That these excellent women remain nearly invisible to men gives them a sort of second sight into men’s shortcomings, a clarity that their more tempestuous counterparts lack coupled with a charity their targets scarcely deserve. But their insight refracts back on themselves. Is there a sadder self-abnegation in literature than Mildred’s dejected laundry-hamper admission that hers are “just the kind of underclothes a person like me might wear, so there is no need to describe them”? (There a chapter ends, nail firmly pounded into coffin.)

Would you believe me if I told you that “Excellent Women” is a marriage comedy? You’d be forgiven for not knowing, even if you finished it: The novel itself offers the possibility that excellent women “are not for marrying” (so a lunch date, the anthropologist Everard Bone, tells Mildred) and ends with its heroine’s fate unsealed. You’d need to read a different Pym novel to learn that Miss Lathbury has gone on to marry Mr. Bone. If the classic comedy ends in a marriage, Pym has displaced the denouement to a footnote in a follow-up novel. How’s that for delayed gratification?

That could be because, despite what some of her characters think, marriage is not the ultimate Pymian gratification. Her heroines are not all spinsters; Wilmet Forsyth in “A Glass of Blessings” (1958) is married, contentedly enough. But marriage is not her happy ending; her husband flirts with an affair, a friend’s husband flirts with her, and she in turn flirts with a man who turns out to be gay. Ianthe Broome, who forms the unsuitable attachment of “An Unsuitable Attachment” (written in the early 1960s, but published posthumously in 1982), does eventually get the marriage no one expects of her, described in terms so chill and flat they banish any thought of romance in favor of doldrum domesticity. Are the lovers “imparadised in one another’s arms, as Milton put it,” as one guest suggests? No, he corrects himself: “Encasseroled, perhaps.”

That’s a typical Pym puncturing. She is a comedian of manners, and a fastidious chronicler of her chosen country, whose map stretches from Anglican suburbia to country parishes and metropolitan London. The church and its ritual provide endless fodder; it gives structure to Pym’s novels, as it gave structure to her life. But it is a misapprehension to think her work speaks only to the devout. There is an agnostic gospel even a nonbeliever can take away from Pym, and it goes like this: Life is full of mild, durable disappointments. It can even be funny.

Her nominal purview may be narrow but her insight into the drowsy roil of human society extends to the devout and the lax. Her gift is to find the venality that afflicts the holy and the profane alike, and to present it without malice or spite. (Larkin called Pym’s an “innocent irony.”) And her charm is to forgive even the most glib, vulgar, dull or boorish, which is to say, all of her characters, and all of us in our turn. It is nearly a banality to say she is an astute social anthropologist, given the preponderance of anthropologists in her novels. (Pym, who completed her first novel at 16, kept a day job her whole writing life, at the International African Institute in London.) “Haven’t the novelist and the anthropologist more in common than some people think?” Everard wonders. An excellent woman might not feel the need for such an obvious statement.

Pym is formidable, but she is also kind; she can be prim, but she is not stiff. Her characters may be unworldly even while proclaiming their worldliness, like the imperious, elderly Miss Doggett, in “Jane and Prudence,” who knows that men only want one thing, but cannot remember what it is. But Pym herself is wiser. In her brisk, unsoppy course, she touches on topics The Church Times wouldn’t dare: infidelity, ennui, resignation, homosexuality and the indignities of age.