Jane and Prudence is a novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was an English novelist. In 1977 her career was revived when two prominent writers, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century...

, first published in 1953 and according to the novelist Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper OBE is an English author. She started her career as a journalist and wrote numerous works of non-fiction before writing several romance novels, the first of which appeared in 1975. She is most famous for writing the Rutshire Chronicles.-Early life:Jilly Sallitt was born in Hornchurch,...

her finest work “ full of wit, plotting, characterization and miraculous observation"

Plot summary

Jane, a vicar's wife, lives a very different kind of life from her friend, the single and independent Prudence. The book details the period in Nicholas and Jane’s life when they take over a new parish in an (anonymous) English village and encounter the widower Fabian Driver, who Jane decides will make an excellent husband for Prudence. Prudence has an imponderable attraction to her older and completely impervious employer, the head of an unspecified academic foundation. There is, however, competition for Fabian - Miss Morrow, another spinster in the parish who seeks escape from her low-paid job as a companion to the domineering Miss Doggett.

Characters

• Jane a good hearted Vicar’s wife in her 40th year
• Nicholas, her mild mannered husband
• Flora, their despairing teenage daughter
• Prudence 29 a beautiful and elegant spinster
• Fabian, a vain and self-obsessed widower
• Miss Doggett, a tyrannical old lady
• Miss Morrow, her outwardly meek but calculating companion

External links

• http://www.st-gabriels.com
• http://www.barbara-pym.org