sentences:  The character of Rockingham Napier has been flag lieutenant to an admiral in Italy where his wife says he 'hasn't had to do anything much but be charming to a lot of dreary Wren officers'; Barbara Pym had been a WRN officer in Italy during World War II.In a 14 July 1964 letter, having just re-read "Excellent Women", the poet Philip Larkin wrote to Pym saying that the novel was "better than I remembered it, full of a harsh kind of suffering [-] it's a study of the pain of being single,- time and again one senses not only that Mildred is suffering but that nobody can see why she shouldn't suffer, like a Victorian cabhorse.