Her rather uneventful life grows more exciting with the arrival of new neighbours in the flat below her, anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome husband Rocky, to whom Mildred feels herself drawn.

Eventually the ill-matched married couple quarrel when Helena leaves a hot saucepan on a polished walnut table; she storms off to live with her mother and he to stay in a country cottage he owns.

A subplot revolves around the activities of Julian Malory, who accepts Allegra Gray, a glamorous clergyman's widow, as a tenant for the flat in his vicarage.

Throughout these events, Mildred wryly observes the ups and downs of matrimony, offering a ready ear to the participants and wondering whether she would be happy left completely on the shelf.

By the end of the novel, however, Mildred reluctantly agrees to play the 'excellent woman' in Everard’s life, to the extent of proof-reading his learned papers and helping index them.

Barbara Pym originally outlined the novel in one of her notebooks, where it is headed "A full life", the phrase on which the book's eventual final chapter closes.

[5] Pym completed the novel in February 1951 and it appeared the following year from Jonathan Cape, which had published her previous Some Tame Gazelle, as was noted on its cover.

The book was well received, with plaudits which included the Church Times comparing her writing to Jane Austen's, while John Betjeman, in his review for The Daily Telegraph, praised its humour.

The novelist John Updike, reviewing it then, wrote that:[8] Excellent Women... is a startling reminder that solitude may be chosen, and that a lively, full novel can be constructed entirely within the precincts of that regressive virtue: feminine patience.Translations into European languages began soon after, with the Dutch Geweldige Vrouwen in 1980,[9] followed by a Spanish translation in 1985,[10] an Italian in the same year,[11] and a German in 1988.

Thus Mildred reflects, "I know myself to be capable of dealing with most of the stock situations or even the great moments of life – birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fete spoiled by bad weather".

In Less than Angels (1955), Everard reappears as a character, described as "having married a rather dull woman who was nevertheless a great help to him in his work; as a clergyman's daughter she naturally got on very well with the missionaries that they were meeting now that they were in Africa again."