Books like Margaret Oliphant

Sophy Stanton-Lacy enters a disorderly household and immediately recognizes that everyone’s supposedly private difficulties are really failures of management. She applies nerve, charm, theatrical timing, and an Olympian disregard for timid convention.

One of Heyer’s most beloved comedies, the novel has the same intoxicating faith in an energetic woman’s ability to rearrange her social world. Sophy’s methods are wilder than Lucilla’s, but the underlying pleasure is identical: watching a heroine understand the rules so thoroughly that she can bend them while everyone else is still insisting they are fixed.

Mildred Lathbury appears to be merely useful: the unmarried woman who makes tea, helps at church, and receives other people’s confidences. Pym gradually reveals how much of communal life depends upon such supposedly peripheral women—and how sharply Mildred observes those who take her for granted.

The comedy is quieter than Oliphant’s but just as exact about status, self-deception, clerical society, and the meanings hidden inside ordinary courtesies. It is easy to see why Philip Larkin became one of Pym’s great champions. Readers return to this novel because every modest sentence contains a flicker of rebellion; missing it would mean missing one of English fiction’s funniest anatomies of underestimated female intelligence.