It is these asides, I think, that make Excellent Women so beguiling. The plot itself is not without interest, but it is the narrator’s comments on her world and on the scraps of pleasure it allows her that are so utterly engaging; as where Mildred says, right at the beginning: ” ‘I have to share a bathroom,’ I had so often murmured, almost with shame, as if I personally had been found unworthy of a bathroom of my own.” To be found unworthy of having one’s own bathroom is such an unexpected notion, but it is amusing because it is a cri de coeur of frustrated ambition, of a desire to be something that fate will clearly never allow one to be.