Small Lives 
 I read this for a two-family book club. Despite coming from a totally different background himself, the other husband has a penchant for selecting smallish books about people living somewhat in the shadows, frequently with a religious connection, and often British. And so it is with this novel from 1952 by Barbara Pym. Mildred Lathbury, an unmarried woman in her thirties, lives in an apartment with shared bathroom in an unfashionable part of London. In the mornings, she works in an agency for Distressed Gentlewomen. The afternoons she spends on good works, mostly in connection with St. Mary's, the local church of the High Anglican persuasion, where communion is called mass and sanctified with incense. She is one of those "excellent women" who are always ready to make a cup of tea or help out at a jumble sale. She is, after all, a vicar's daughter. 
 Though told in the third person, we see the action very much through Mildred's eyes. Though apparently quite content with her single state, she resents others taking her for granted. She makes herself useful, but prefers to do so on her own terms. She also has feelings. When a married couple moves in next door (thus sharing the same bathroom), and she discovers that all is not well between them, she struggles with her attraction to the dashing husband. When Father Julian Mallory, the priest of St. Mary's and a good friend, gets involved with a clergyman's widow that he and his sister take in as a lodger in the rectory, she has mixed feelings; though free to marry, unlike his Roman counterparts, she had always assumed that Father Mallory had embraced an earnest celibacy. Over the quite short novel, a lot of moderately dramatic things will happen to people Mildred knows, leaving her to serve as go-between, pick up the pieces, supervise the movers after the occupants have gone, and make those cups of tea. But we begin to suspect that the traffic will always go around Mildred, leaving her stranded on her island in the middle of life's road. 
 The miracle is that Barbara Pym does this as well as she does, that we never quite lose sympathy with Mildred, and that the book remains a comedy, though a sad one. To write a novel around a character whose life is limited by her own compliance, and not to have it shrink into invisibility, is quite a feat. One reason, perhaps, is that we come to see the lives of those to whom things do happen as nonetheless being as small as Mildred's own if not smaller, at least in spirit. But then I think of other female British authors whom Pym reminds me of, and she fades slightly in the comparison. Elizabeth Bowen, for instance, also paints limited lives, but on a larger canvas and in more acid colors. Several of Penelope Fitzgerald's novels feature single women, but they tend to be more professional and independent. Many of Anita Brookner's heroines might be Mildreds a decade or so on, but they belong to a more sexually independent age. What makes Pym special is the coziness of her niche. But small lives tend to make small novels, though in this case a charming one.