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.[2] 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 well.
There is, however, competition for Fabian: his next-door neighbours are the domineering Miss Doggett and her paid companion Jessie Morrow, who has long loved him and seeks escape from her lowly situation. One evening, Jessie pays him an unannounced visit and they are soon pursuing a clandestine relationship on her evenings off.
Prudence visits the Clevelands again, at the same time as Flora and her undergraduate boyfriend Paul. Fabian greets her enthusiastically when he comes to dinner at the vicarage, but does not seek any time with her alone during the rest of her time there, so the weekend is a disappointing one for Prudence.
Matters come to a head when Miss Doggett guesses that there is something between Fabian and Jessie and tells Jane of her suspicions; they find the pair at Fabian’s house and they confirm that they are to be married. Jane offers to write to Prudence, and Fabian says he will too.
Prudence is very upset: she is not used to being rejected. She is consoled to some extent by the attentions and friendship of a colleague, Geoffrey Manifold, whom she had previously not had much time for but whose kindness she now recognises. At the end of the book Arthur Grampian finally asks her to have dinner with him; she turns him down as she is going out with Geoffrey, but life seems full of promise again.
Publication history and reception
Jane and Prudence was Pym's third novel, published by Jonathan Cape in 1953. Whereas Pym's first two novels had been successful, this received more mixed reviews. Literary figures Lady Cynthia Asquith and Lord David Cecil both championed the novel, but The Guardian felt it was "a horrid disappointment after Excellent Women" and the Times Literary Supplement remarked that the plot was "not easy to recall after one has closed the book".[3] The novelist Jilly Cooper regards Jane and Prudence as Pym's finest work - "full of wit, plotting, characterization and miraculous observation".[4] Throughout her life, Pym remained unhappy with the novel, commenting several times in her diary that she had not emphasised the "town and country" differences between the lives of the protagonists more effectively [5]
The novel did not sell particularly well; the initial bookshop orders from Cape totalled 2,300 [6] and the publisher had sold 5,052 copies by the end of the 1950s. This meant that the book had made money, but was not a bestseller.[7] Pym reported in 1954 that the publishers could attract no interest from American or Continental publishers.[8] The book was first published in the United States in 1981, after Pym's death.
The novel was released as an audiobook by Hachette in 2011, read by Maggie Mash.
Characters
Jane Cleveland, a good-hearted vicar’s wife, aged 41
Nicholas Cleveland, her mild-mannered husband
Flora Cleveland, their daughter
Paul, Flora's boyfriend
Prudence Bates, aged 29, a beautiful and elegant spinster[9]
Fabian Driver, a vain and self-obsessed widower
Miss Doggett, a tyrannical old lady
Miss Morrow, her outwardly meek but calculating companion[10]
Arthur Grampian, the director of the institution where Prudence works
Geoffrey Manifold, an academic working at the same institution
other office workers at the institution
Edward Lyall, the MP of the constituency in which the village is situated
Mrs Lyall, his mother
people living in the village and active in the church
Characters in Pym novels often reappear or are referenced in later works. The characters of Miss Morrow and Miss Doggett had originally appeared in an early unpublished work from 1940, Crampton Hodnet, which would be published after Pym's death. The character of Miss Morrow is distinctly different in Jane and Prudence, as is that of Barbara Bird, also re-used from Crampton Hodnet.[13]
The character of William Caldicote, from Pym's previous novel Excellent Women, appears very briefly late in this volume. Miss Doggett reports that Mildred Lathbury from the same novel married the anthropologist Everard Bone.
^For an evaluation of this setting see "Jane and Prudence", in Reading Barbara Pym, Donato, D., pp. 81-101, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005 ISBN0-8386-4095-8.
^Holt, Hazel (1990). A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym. London: Macmillan. p. 164. ISBN0525249370.
^"If you want a great read Barbara Pym will fix it" - article in "Seven" p3, Sunday Telegraph Issue 2,425 (dated 3 December 2007)
^Cocking, Yvonne, Jane and Prudence: A Novel of Contrasts, paper featured in Green Leaves: The Journal of the Barbara Pym Society, Spring 2012.
^letter from Wren Howard to Barbara Pym, October 1955,, published in A Few Green Leaves: The Journal of the Barbara Pym Society, Vol 9, No. 2, November 2003
^An analysis of her inner qualities is found in Barbara Pym and Anthony Trollope: Communities of Imaginative Participation Heberlein, K.B. in "Pacific Coast Philology", Vol. 19, No. 1/2 (Nov., 1984), pp. 95-100
^These last two characters resurface in Crampton Hodnet where they are ensconced in academic Oxford-article The importance of literature in the novels of Barbara Pym Ackley, K.A pp33-46 in "All this reading: the literary world of Barbara Pym" Lenckos, F.E./. Miller, E.J. (Ed) Maddison, N.J. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003 ISBN0-8386-3956-9
^A Few Green Leaves: The Journal of the Barbara Pym Society, Vol. 11, No. 2, November 2005
