I’ve been thinking about the differences between Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women.
The most admirable, dignified and memorable character in Vera is a 50-year-old spinster Miss Entwhistle. She doesn’t see herself as useless or rejected like Pym’s heroine. She’s a person of great dignity and quiet but unbreakable inner strength. Miss Entwhistle chose not to get married because she decided she was better off single. It’s clear that for her it was the right choice. You can feel anything but pity for her because she’s not in the least pathetic. But her admirable character isn’t written in a deliberate, pointed way, either. Von Arnim doesn’t try to prove anything or make a point. She creates a character whose dignity is revealed as something normal and expected. Pym, on the other hand, tries to make a point out of everything and comes off as fake.
It’s interesting to me that von Arnim could write about an unmarried middle-aged woman as an admirable, interesting person in 1921 but 30 years later Pym couldn’t. This tracks with something I long observed in Spanish literature. As we get farther away from the oppressive, patriarchal 19th and early 20th century, the more weepy, whiny, self-infantilizing and pouty do female characters become.
Something killed off interesting female characters in mid-twentieth century. It’s like there was a virus that wiped them off.
Clarissa's Blog 
One thing that happened was different results from, and reactions to, the world wars. A generation of European men was wiped out in WWI, and as a result, “excess” women just got on with things and refused to think of themselves as lessened by not having husbands. Also the war really liberated women; those who volunteered to nurse or do other jobs that helped the war effort learned to do things that had before been discouraged or completely closed off. In WWII, Britain had universal conscription, for women as well as men, and also a lot more men came back. So there were a lot of women working in factories or as Land Girls or in one of the women’s services who really didn’t want to be there, and dreamed of going home and having babies; when the war was over, a lot of them were thrilled to be done with communal life. Pym joined the WRENs to get away from a love affair gone bad—and she seems never to have had a very successful romantic relationship—that experience informs Mildred’s naval background, in Excellent Women. But I do wonder if you might be missing the understated humor of Mildred’s self-assessment; I read her self-deprecation as sarcastic, and see her as having a pretty strong sense of self.
Since the US didn’t have universal conscription, post-war feminism developed differently here, but there was still a strong message of “go home and leave work to the men” delivered to young women after WWII ended. My mother ran afoul of it; that was partly why she thought marrying a professor would be a great “job,” giving access to academic culture without the uphill fight to get an advanced degree in a world that made that hard for women. Not that she pulled it off for herself. She was both dismayed and impressed that I wanted to get a Ph.D. and get credit for research I did, rather than being willing to do a husband’s work for him.
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“doesn’t see herself as useless or rejected like Pym’s heroine”
Were the characters in Pym’s book from the generation who largely couldn’t get married because so many young British men were killed in WWI?
That could explain part of the difference…..
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I don’t know, there are as many unmarried men as women in the novel. Somehow people are just bad at pairing up in that novel. Everybody is very particular and stuck in their ways.
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I left this last night but it’s not showing up:
One thing that happened was different results from, and reactions to, the world wars. A generation of European men was wiped out in WWI, and as a result, “excess” women just got on with things and refused to think of themselves as lessened by not having husbands. Also the war really liberated women; those who volunteered to nurse or do other jobs that helped the war effort learned to do things that had before been discouraged or completely closed off. In WWII, Britain had universal conscription, for women as well as men, and also a lot more men came back. So there were a lot of women working in factories or as Land Girls or in one of the women’s services who really didn’t want to be there, and dreamed of going home and having babies; when the war was over, a lot of them were thrilled to be done with communal life. Pym joined the WRENs to get away from a love affair gone bad—and she seems never to have had a very successful romantic relationship—that experience informs Mildred’s naval background, in Excellent Women. But I do wonder if you might be missing the understated humor of Mildred’s self-assessment; I read her self-deprecation as sarcastic, and see her as having a pretty strong sense of self.
Since the US didn’t have universal conscription, post-war feminism developed differently here, but there was still a strong message of “go home and leave work to the men” delivered to young women after WWII ended. My mother ran afoul of it; that was partly why she thought marrying a professor would be a great “job,” giving access to academic culture without the uphill fight to get an advanced degree in a world that made that hard for women. Not that she pulled it off for herself. She was both dismayed and impressed that I wanted to get a Ph.D. and get credit for research I did, rather than being willing to do a husband’s work for him.
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Pym was a communist.
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Oh Great Cat, sorry, now I’m delivering the same long lecture twice!
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It’s the app glitching. But that’s ok, a great comment should appear several times in a row.
I’m sorry for the unintended spamming of your comments. I have no control over this process, unfortunately.
But these are great great books. I’m very happy I discovered them.
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