It was Carrie Frye, former managing editor of idiosyncratic news website The Awl who set my feet on the path of righteousness when she described Barbara Pym’s work as “spinster drag novels” and instructed me to hold off on Crampton Hodnet until after I’d taken a crack at Excellent Women. I’d had a vague sense of Pym’s oeuvre before that, of course—I could conjure up dim pictures of a mid-century British woman standing in front of a kitchen sink, a resentful curate, the feeling of going out to buy a new dress and feeling disproportionately hopeless about the entire human condition as a result—but it wasn’t until Frye described the compensatory pleasures of the pose of unrequited love “narratively severed from its object” that I really started to pay attention.

In a...