I re-read most of Barbara Pym's books regularly, and my favourite is usually the one I'm reading at the time (although I must admit to a particular fondness for Less Than Angels. Her leading characters can usually be summed up by the title of one of her books - they are frequently Excellent Women, living ordered lives and attending to daily minutiae with diligence. Wilmet in A Glass of Blessings is such a woman, attending Portuguese lessons with her mother-in-law, helping at the clergy house; she is also rather self-centred and bored with her stolid civil servant husband.

The opening immediately puts the date at an earlier time: "I suppose it must have been the shock of hearing the telephone ring, apparently in the church, which made me turn my head and see Piers Longridge in one of the side aisles behind me." These days it would be someone having carelessly left their mobile switched on, but in the '50s it must indeed have seemed rather strange, and Wilmet spends some time speculating on whom it might be, at the expense of her devotions.

This is a very quiet book with few excitements - for Wilmet the days go by uneventfully, occasionally enlivened by a meeting with Piers, with whom she would like to be in love. Not anything as sordid as an actual affair, but she would like him to need her and find her a necessary influence in his life, so that they would continue to enjoy mildly flirtatious lunches. Meanwhile, she's barely noticing various factors which will have an effect on her own life.

Pym's writing has a delicious delicacy and wit and shrewd observance. I remember from her diaries that she noted down things she overheard - they may not have been reproduced verbatim, but they come back in spirit, and are part of what makes her characters live. There are also occasional references to characters from others of her books, which gives them a life outside the novels. Professor John Bayley, in his introduction to another edition, compares her writing to Anthony Powell's, whose characters move in and out of A Dance to the Music of Time as they would in real life and concludes "It has about it the whole breadth and depth of comedy as art."

My apologies; if I requested this book, it appears that due to family commitments I was not able to read it before the book was archived. I'm sorry it has lingered this long.