Barbara Pym’s delightfully comic novel Jane and Prudence, which was published in 1953, focuses on the unlikely friendship between the two titular characters.
The two women met at Oxford University, where Jane, twelve years Prudence’s senior, taught the younger woman on the English Literature degree programme.
Despite a shared love of English Literature, the women’s lives have gone in very different directions. Jane has taken the seemingly more conventional route, marrying Nicholas, a mild-mannered clergyman, and playing the dutiful wife by sacrificing any possibility of an academic career to follow him from parish to parish. Prudence, on the other hand, leads a glamorous life: living in London, working as a personal assistant to a writer, and having a series of hopeless affairs.
However, both women are faced with the same challenge of trying to work out their place as a woman in post-war English society. Does marriage matter? Is it worth sacrificing a career for love? Is it important to have children? It all goes back to that age-old question: can women have it all?
The novel opens with Jane and Prudence back at Oxford for a student reunion. Prudence reflects on how all the married women there, including Jane, shy away from glamour: ‘the … unpainted faces, the wispy hair, the dowdy clothes’. Conversely Jane reflects on the fact that Prudence looks ‘like somebody in a woman’s magazine, carefully ‘groomed’, and wearing a red dress that sets off her pale skin and dark hair’. At the same time she wonders why Prudence has never married: ‘One wondered if it was really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, when poor Prudence seemed to have lost so many times’. When one of the married women comments to Prudence that her work ‘”must be ample compensation for not being married”’, Prudence dismisses the sentiment, saying ‘”I don’t need compensation… I often think being married would be rather a nuisance. I’ve got a nice flat and am so used to living on my own I should hardly know what to do with a husband.”’
However, even if Prudence is happy with her life – and the novel suggests that may not be entirely the case – Jane has other ideas. She and Nicholas have recently moved to a new rural parish and Jane decides to use this event as an opportunity to ‘help’ Prudence, inviting her to stay ‘for a nice long time’ in the belief that ‘[n]ew surroundings and new people would do much for her…’ She also turns her attention to the local male residents, quickly identifying a dashing widower, Fabian Driver, who she thinks ‘might perhaps do for … Prudence’.
Whether or not Fabian ‘does’ for Prudence, I will leave you to find out for yourself. However, the preoccupation with marriage, and how women should lead their lives runs throughout the novel: unsurprisingly there is no equivalent conversation about men.
That men are profoundly different from women is a recurring topic of conversation, though one that only preoccupies women (not men).
For example, it is agreed that ‘”men need company more than women do”’ as ‘”[a] woman has a thousand and one little tasks in the house, and then her knitting or sewing.”’ Elsewhere, one character comments ‘”We know that men are not like women….Men are very passionate…”’
Another area where the sexes differ– in terms of the amount of conversation devoted to it in the novel – is food, whether that be the quantity each sex needs or how and what they may eat.
When Jane and Nicholas go out for lunch in the local café shortly after moving into the village, they both order egg and bacon but there is a significant difference between what each is served:
‘At last Mrs Crampton emerged from behind the velvet curtain carrying two plates on a tray. She put in front of Jane a plate containing an egg, a rasher of bacon and some fried potatoes cut in fancy shapes, and in front of Nicholas a plate with two eggs and rather more potatoes.
Nicholas exclaimed with pleasure.
“Oh, a man needs eggs!” said Mrs Crampton, also looking pleased.
This insistence on a man’s needs amused Jane. Men needed meat and eggs – well, yes, that might be allowed; but surely not more than women did?’
Prudence also reflects on the differences between what men and women eat, though for her the difference is socially-constructed and a result of status and finances. Out for lunch on a working day she imagines her boss, Dr Grampian ‘eating in a rather grand club with noble portals’ in contrast to women like her ‘eating in a small, rather grimy restaurant which did a lunch for three and sixpence including coffee. While Arthur Grampian was shaking the red pepper on to his smoked salmon, Prudence was having to choose between the shepherd’s pie and the stuffed marrow’.
Having made and consumed her choice – we’re not told what she does choose – Prudence gets up and goes to pay her bill at the cash desk. On the way, she walks past a male colleague, Mr Manifold, who is ‘eating – perhaps “tucking into” would describe it better – the steamed pudding which Prudence had avoided as being too fattening.’
The idea of women having to deprive themselves of ‘fattening’ food is, alas, a concern which still resonates in today’s society. Whilst it is pleasing to read later in the novel that Prudence – in the wake of a particularly traumatic event – treats herself to lunch in an expensive restaurant: a dry Martini, smoked salmon, chicken breast and vegetables, sadly the only dessert she will allow herself is ‘a really ripe yellow-fleshed peach.’
Should she change her mind though, I made the steamed pudding – and ate it (not in one go of course).
EVERY WOMAN’S STEAMED PUDDING
Ingredients (serves 6-8…women):
175g very soft unsalted butter
175g self-raising flour (or 165g plain flour plus 2 teaspoons baking powder)
175g caster sugar
3 large eggs
3 tablespoons milk
5 tablespoons jam (or golden syrup)
Method:
Grease a 1 ¾ litre pudding basin, and spoon the jam in to cover the bottom.
Place all the other ingredients in a food mixer or processor, and beat together to create a thick pouring consistency (if it seems too thick, add a little more milk).
Pour the sponge mixture on top of the jam. If you’re using a plastic basin with a lid, then just place the lid on top (having buttered it first). Otherwise, place a piece of buttered greaseproof paper or foil over the top of the basin, and secure with string.
Put the kettle on, and when it boils pour enough water into a large saucepan (with a lid) to come up about halfway up the side of the pudding basin when in. Place the lid on top of the saucepan and put it on a low heat to keep the water going at a steady simmer. Make sure it doesn’t boil dry – you will probably need to add some extra water now and again.
Cook the pudding for a minimum of two hours. Remove the basin from the boiling water. Let it rest for a couple of minutes, before turning out and serving with cream, ice-cream or custard.
