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Mildred Lathbury is thirty, unmarried, a clergyman's daughter who works mornings at a charity for impoverished gentlewomen and spends the rest of her time being useful to other people. She is, in the parlance of her postwar London parish, an excellent woman: the sort who can be relied upon to make tea for any occasion, to organise the church jumble sale, to listen patiently to the marital grievances of people who consider her too plain to have grievances of her own. This is the entire premise of the book, and it is also, somehow, enough. Pym has written a novel in which almost nothing happens and yet which leaves you feeling you have witnessed a whole society laid bare.

The trick is Mildred's voice. She narrates her own diminishment with such dry, watchful intelligence that you quickly understand the title to be ironic. The world treats Mildred as a piece of useful furniture, a person whose chief virtue is her availability, and the men around her are particularly guilty of this: they assume she must be quietly in love with whichever unmarried curate or anthropologist happens to be nearby, when in fact she is busy taking their measure and finding them wanting. Not one of them is worthy of her. They are obtuse, self-absorbed, faintly ridiculous, forever requiring the typing and proofreading and emotional management that excellent women supply for free. Behind Mildred's plain facade is a social observer more ruthless than the anthropologists whose profession is the study of mankind, and the joy of the novel lies in watching her see everything while pretending to see nothing.

The comedy is real and it is constant, though it works by accumulation rather than by set pieces. Pym's gift is for the concise, devastating detail: a sister-in-law dressed in an odd assortment of clothes that had belonged to other people, a dispiriting dinner of pale macaroni with not enough salt and certainly not enough cheese. Each of these observations is polished to a gleam, and each does double duty, raising a smile while quietly cataloguing the small disappointments that make up an ordinary life. The Church, to which Mildred is genuinely devoted, comes off no better than the men: a shrinking institution staffed by clergy going through the motions, propped up almost entirely by the spinsters who arrange its flowers and run its bazaars. There is something bracing in Pym's refusal to sentimentalise the very world she clearly loves.

It would be easy to overstate the book's gentleness. Underneath the teacups runs a genuine vein of pain, the ache of a woman who suspects she is missing some of life's pleasures and cannot quite say so. The most clear-eyed readers have always recognised this: that the novel is, beneath the wit, a study of the particular suffering of being single, and of a society that cannot understand why such a person should suffer at all. That tension between the light surface and the darker undertow is precisely what gives the comedy its weight.

The book is not flawless, and it is worth being honest about where it tests a reader's patience. Mildred's passivity, so essential to the portrait, can become genuinely frustrating; there are stretches where her endless submission to everyone's demands grates rather than charms, and where you long for her to refuse just once. The plot, such as it is, consists of her being drawn into other people's affairs, and the final quarter loses some of its grip, drifting toward an ambiguous close that can read as either a sly open question or a faint deflation of everything that came before. Whether Mildred ends up better off is left deliberately unresolved, and not every reader will find that ambiguity satisfying; some will simply find it inconclusive. If you come wanting plot, momentum, or a romance that resolves, this is the wrong book, and no amount of admiring the prose will fix that.

But to read it on those terms is to miss what Pym is doing. She understood that a sense of self is built from small details that grow quietly significant, and that the texture of most lives is made of minor unpleasantnesses and little useless longings rather than great tragedies. Excellent Women honours exactly that scale. It is a modest book about a modest woman, written by an author long underrated for being so unshowy, and it turns out to contain far more than its surface admits. Read it slowly, with tea to hand, and let it accumulate. The reward is considerable.