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Excellent Women
''Excellent Women'', the second published novel by Barbara Pym, first appeared from Jonathan Cape in 1952. A novel of manners, it is generally acclaimed as her funniest and most successful in that genre. Title The phrase "excellent women" appears frequently throughout the novel, and is often used by men in reference to the kind of women who perform small but meaningful duties in the service of churches and voluntary organisations and are taken for granted. The phrase first appears in Pym's early unpublished novel '' Civil to Strangers'' and is taken from Jane Austen's novel ''Sanditon''. Plot summary The book is a first-person narrative in which Mildred Lathbury records the humdrum details of her everyday life in post-war London near the start of the 1950s. Perpetually self-deprecating, but with the sharpest wit, Mildred is a clergyman's daughter who is now just over thirty and lives in "a shabby part…very much the 'wrong' side of Victoria Station". She works part-time at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barbara Pym
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist. In the 1950s she published a series of social comedies, of which the best known are '' Excellent Women'' (1952) and '' A Glass of Blessings'' (1958). In 1977 her career was revived when the critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Her novel '' Quartet in Autumn'' (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Biography Early life Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913 at 72 Willow Street in Oswestry, Shropshire, the elder daughter of Irena Spenser, ''née'' Thomas (1886–1945) and Frederic Crampton Pym (1879–1966), a solicitor. She was educated at Queen's Park School, a girls' school in Oswestry. From the age of 12, she attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. Pym's parents were active in the local Oswestry operatic society, and she ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Church Times
The ''Church Times'' is an independent Anglican weekly newspaper based in London and published in the United Kingdom on Fridays. History The ''Church Times'' was founded on 7 February 1863 by George Josiah Palmer, a printer. It fought for the Anglo-Catholic and high church cause in the Church of England at a time when priests were being harried and imprisoned over such matters as lighting candles on altars and wearing vestments, which brought them into conflict with the Public Worship Regulation Act 1874, intended to "put down" ritualism in the Church of England. The paper defended the spiritual independence of the Church of England in spite of the Church's Established status; many of the ceremonial and doctrinal matters that the paper championed are now accepted as part of mainstream Anglicanism. Its views were opposed by the '' Church of England Newspaper'', which supported evangelical and low church positions. The paper's sympathies have broadened since the mid-1950s, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Less Than Angels
''Less Than Angels'' is a novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1955. Synopsis Catherine Oliphant is a writer of magazine stories and articles who lives with anthropologist Tom Mallow. Tom begins a romance with a student, Deirdre Swan, and moves out of Catherine's flat. At the same time, she becomes interested in reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate, who has recently returned from Africa and lives next-door to Deirdre and her family. A sub-plot involves the activities of Deirdre's fellow-students Mark and Digby, and their attempts to curry favour with influential academics as they seek grants to facilitate the next phase of their careers. Tom departs for Africa, where he is killed during a time of political unrest. Deirdre begins to return Digby's fondness for her, and Catherine seems about to begin a relationship with Alaric. Publication history ''Less Than Angels'' was Pym's fourth novel and was published by Jonathan Cape in October 1955. It received muted reviews, in c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jane And Prudence
''Jane and Prudence'' is the third novel by Barbara Pym, first published in 1953. Plot summary Jane Cleveland, aged 41, is married to a clergyman who has recently taken on a new parish in an English village. Their daughter Flora is to follow in her mother’s footsteps in the autumn by studying English at the same Oxford college. Jane’s friend and former student Prudence Bates, aged 29, lives in London. She is famous for her love affairs but currently has an imponderable attraction to Arthur Grampian, her older, married boss, the head of an unspecified academic foundation. Jane would like to see Prudence married, and thinks she has found a suitable candidate in Fabian Driver, a handsome, fortyish widower who lives in the village and is known to have been habitually unfaithful to his late wife. She invites Prudence to stay for a weekend, knowing that she will meet Fabian at a village event. Prudence and Fabian begin to see each other in London and the romance seems to be going ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasting House, London. Since 2019, the station controller has been Mohit Bakaya. He replaced Gwyneth Williams, who had been the station controller since 2010. Broadcasting throughout the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands on FM broadcast band, FM, Longwave, LW and Digital Audio Broadcasting, DAB, and on BBC Sounds, it can be received in the eastern counties of Republic of Ireland, Ireland, northern France and Northern Europe. It is available on Freeview (UK), Freeview, Freesat, Sky (UK & Ireland), Sky, and Virgin Media. Radio 4 currently reaches over 10 million listeners, making it List of most-listened-to radio programs#Top stations in the United Kingdom, the UK's second most-popular radio station after BBC Radio 2. BBC ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Woman's Hour
''Woman's Hour'' is a radio magazine programme broadcast in the United Kingdom on the BBC Light Programme, BBC Radio 2, and later BBC Radio 4. It has been on the air since 1946. History The first BBC programme for women was the programme called ''Women's Hour'', which was first broadcast on 2 May 1923. The BBC was then a brand new organisation, just a few months old, grappling with the sorts of programmes that might appeal to its small but growing audience. With married women firmly based in the home, either through convention or because of marriage bars, the BBC would have been aware of this captive daytime audience. The person brought in to oversee ''Women's Hour'' was Mrs Ella Fitzgerald, a former Fleet Street journalist, and the inaugural programme included two talks, one on "The Adoption of Babies" given by Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, the other on "Fashions" by the couturier, Lady Duff Gordon. Broadcast six days a week, initially at 5pm, ''Women's Hour'' encom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radio Play
Radio drama (or audio drama, audio play, radio play, radio theatre, or audio theatre) is a dramatised, purely acoustic performance. With no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story: "It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension." Radio drama includes plays specifically written for radio, docudrama, dramatised works of fiction, as well as plays originally written for the theatre, including musical theatre, and opera. Radio drama achieved widespread popularity within a decade of its initial development in the 1920s. By the 1940s, it was a leading international popular entertainment. With the advent of television in the 1950s, radio drama began losing its audience. However, it remains popular in much of the world. Recordings of OTR (old-time radio) survive today in the audio archives of collectors, libraries and museums, as wel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, '' The North Ship'', was published in 1945, followed by two novels, '' Jill'' (1946) and '' A Girl in Winter'' (1947). He came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, '' The Less Deceived'', followed by '' The Whitsun Weddings'' (1964) and '' High Windows'' (1974). He contributed to ''The Daily Telegraph'' as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in ''All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71'' (1985), and edited '' The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse'' (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman. After graduating from Oxford University in 1943 with a first in English Language and Literature, Larkin became a librarian. It was during the thirt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mock-heroic
Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities to such a point that they become absurd. History Historically, the mock-heroic style was popular in 17th-century Italy, and in the post- Restoration and Augustan periods in Great Britain. The earliest example of the form is the '' Batrachomyomachia'' ascribed to Homer by the Romans and parodying his work, but believed by most modern scholars to be the work of an anonymous poet in the time of Alexander the Great. A longstanding assumption on the origin of the mock-heroic in the 17th century is that epic and the pastoral genres had become used up and exhausted,Griffin, Dustin H. (1994) ''Satire: A Critical Reintroduction'p. 135/ref> and so they got parodically reprised. In the 17th century the epic genre was heavily crit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bathos
Bathos ( ;''Oxford English Dictionary'', 1st ed. "bathos, ''n.'' Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1885. , "depth") is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay " Peri Bathous", to describe an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness. ''Bathos'' has come to refer to rhetorical anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one, occurring either accidentally (through artistic ineptitude) or intentionally (for comic effect). Intentional bathos appears in satirical genres such as burlesque and mock epic. "Bathos" or "bathetic" is also used for similar effects in other branches of the arts, such as musical passages marked '' ridicolosamente''. In film, bathos may appear in a contrast cut intended for comic relief or be produced by an accidental jump cut. Alexander Pope's definition ''The Art of Sinking in Poetry'' As a term for the combination of the very high with the v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
International African Institute
The International African Institute (IAI) was founded (as the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures - IIALC) in 1926 in London for the study of African languages. Frederick Lugard was the first chairman (1926 to his death in 1945); Diedrich Hermann Westermann (1926 to 1939) and Maurice Delafosse (1926) were the initial co-directors. Since 1928, the IAI has published a quarterly journal, ''Africa''. For some years during the 1950s and 1960s, the assistant editor was the novelist Barbara Pym. The IAI's mission is "to promote the education of the public in the study of Africa and its languages and cultures". Its operations includes seminars, journals, monographs, edited volumes and stimulating scholarship within Africa. Publications The IAI has been involved in scholarly publishing since 1927. Scholars whose work has been published by the institute include Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, Samir Amin, Karin Barber, Alex de Waal, Patrick Chabal, Mary Douglas, E. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in ''The New Yorker'' starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for ''The New York Review of Books''. His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels ''Rabbit, Run''; ''Rabbit Redux''; ''Rabbit Is Rich''; ''Rabbit at Rest''; and the novella ''Rabbit Remembered''), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Rabbit Angstrom, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both ''Rabbit Is Rich'' (1981) and ''Ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
