spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those “excellent women,” the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighborsâ??anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next doorâ??the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

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