Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

This book is supposed to be 'one of the humorous masterpieces of the 20th century' or something, but I actually found it quite depressing. It's basically Cranford in post-War London, which is bad news for someone like me, who hates Cranford. It's a ridiculously fussy book, and I found the main character so unendurably dull that I kept being on the point of dropping it. The only reason I read it is that I'm under a lot of stress right now and I found it sort of relaxing to read about the little concerns of the characters. It's about sensible, 30+ unmarried women, who seem to spend all their time in fussy little activities, regarding everyone around them with determined but very lukewarm affection. There isn't a single strong emotion in this book that hasn't been diluted by the main character/narrator's irony, which I found really irritating. It's even hard to tell when she falls in love (or whether she's in love really). The smallness of the lives of these 'excellent women' drove me mad, I expect that gentle irony is the effect that is aimed for, but it just irritated me. I just found the entire atmosphere narrow and claustrophobic and pointless, I felt like I was shut up in a tiny, dim Victorian parlour, with a thousand little knick-knacks ready to fall if I so much as breathed.