During the nineteenth century, many novels set out to map aspects of the spinster experience—Cranford (1853) by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope, Emma (1816) by Jane Austen, which featured the classically inept Miss Bates, the ultimate spinster biddy, fluttering, talking out of turn, and babbling on at the sidelines. Miss Bates has a twittery cousin in Jane Osborne, the stuck-at-home daughter in Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray, and another relative in Miss Tonks, the schoolteacher in Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862).
But none of these books—and there are hundreds of them—“solve” the spinster’s problem. Some of the characters walk through life oblivious, unaware that most people think them useless, afeminine, and dim-witted. Other spinsters have analyzed their social status and feel all the proper outrage, only what to do? They speak out in long angry monologues addressed either to mirrors or to parents who are powerless to help.
Very few novels propose alternatives. One entertaining exception is a British novel called The Odd Women (1898) by George Gissing. His story begins with a widowed doctor who, in the first paragraph, dies in a carriage accident. He leaves behind five daughters, none of whom has any known skills. He leaves them no money, and due to the sexist British inheritance laws, no house. They abandon the country estate that is no longer theirs and head for London. There they begin the downward spiral of so many single women of the time, both in life and fiction. Two sisters die. The youngest, prettiest, and least able to withstand it is sent out to do factory work while the older two talk a great deal about starting schools or perhaps just teaching in one. Yet they never do. They sit about the parlor of their hotel and, later, on the beds of shabbier rooming houses, and as months pass, their plans and their conversations make less and less sense. They’re always drunk.
Then the three surviving sisters are reunited with an intense young woman they’d met years earlier. Her name is Rhoda Nunn, and she is hawkish-looking, unmarried, and proud, a spinster who considers her position a privilege. With an older friend of hers, Miss Barfoot, Rhoda has started a special school for single women; she teaches them how to “typewrite,” and to take dictation. Recognizing that there is little she can do for the elder two, Rhoda persuades Monica, the youngest, to leave the factory and enroll at her school. But Monica is a poor, unfocused student and soon leaves to marry a much older man who has pursued—some might say stalked—her for months. Monica does not love him, but she knows she cannot support herself, that she has neither the will nor the talent to live in the world like Rhoda Nunn. The marriage is disastrous. The husband expects his young wife to wait on him. Monica is shocked by the presumption, uninterested and resentful. Watching it transpire, Rhoda again feels blessed.
That is, until Miss Barfoot introduces Rhoda to her nephew, Everard. He is deeply impressed with the solidity and devotion Rhoda brings to her work and, to Rhoda’s amazement, he expresses romantic interest. For a long dreamy time Rhoda is enraptured by this attentive nephew and with the idea that a man should pursue her at all. It starts to seem that she might leave the school and marry Everard. Then Monica dies in childbirth and Rhoda, after agonizing contemplation, rejects Everard, relieved, it seems, to have that part of her life, that possibility, over and done with. “No man had ever made love to her,” Gissing writes. “She derived satisfaction from this thought, using it to strengthen her life’s purpose; having passed her thirtieth year, she might take it as a settled thing… and so shut the doors on every instinct tending to trouble her intellectual decisions.”
Rhoda returns to the school and with the two reformed alcoholic sisters takes in Monica’s child from the useless husband to claim as theirs. It makes sense. As she says, for women like herself, “the world is moving.”
That meant the women who were known as “strong-minded.” As The Independent observed in 1873, “A dozen years ago hardly one female could be found… who would openly acknowledge that she was strong-minded…. Now they not only acknowledge that they are such, but they glory in it.” Investigative reporter Ida Tarbell added, “Four hundred years ago, a woman sought celibacy as an escape from sin. Today she adopts it to escape inferiority and servitude; superiority and freedom are her aim.”
But even the strong-minded would find their own lives, their own gloried versions of an Old Maid’s Hall, hard to sustain. Spread out among schools, settlements, and all receptive points between, single women struggled to keep up contact. Letters were very slow in arriving, and it was costly to travel. Holidays and birthdays passed without one’s primary friends and relatives around to celebrate. Important news—of a move, an illness, sometimes of a death—arrived weeks, sometimes months, after the fact.
Losing a job could be traumatic. Aging single women found the hunt for work an exhausting, demoralizing process, and it was tiring to imagine reorganizing an unconventional life at age forty-plus. Some maintained the stamina for political work, living meagerly on small honoraria augmented by donations and article writing, but much about their lives seemed increasingly difficult. Serious politico-feminists traveled year-round, claiming no residence, their days spent on bad roads (in horse-drawn carriages or on wooden-seated trains) to reach provincial places that were often dangerous. Protestors sometimes broke up their speeches by hurling raw eggs, symbolic reminders of the speaker’s presumably unfertilized ova.
“I do not feel like myself these times,” wrote a teacher who was “staying on against my wishes” in Virginia, to a sister staying on against her own wishes in Ohio, 1875. “I dare not look at a map and the spaces between us and the impossibility of it so weakens me. I admit I have dropped into tears…. Will I ever see you? Or anyone?”
These separations, and other anxieties of spinster life, were most realistically expressed in a tiny genre of short fiction known as “spinster stories.” Written in the mid-nineteenth century, these tales were often collected in year-end gift books, elaborately illustrated volumes of the year’s best literature, essays, and short fiction that made fancy and beloved Christmas presents.
In these stories the spinster often appears as a wise, older aunt who one day decides to talk of her life to a young niece. Usually, the niece is not prepared to hear about it. My spinster aunt once fell in love? My spinster aunt had a life outside this house? Of course, in the end the niece is forced to reevaluate not only her views of her aged aunt (who isn’t really as old as she’d seemed) but her presumptions about women, marriage, what it might really be like to live alone.
An interesting example of this genre is a story called “One Old Maid,” from a Scribner’s collection entitled Handicapped (1881), by Marian Harland. The story begins on New Year’s Eve in the opulent dining room of a mansion. There, beneath the chandeliers, we meet Juliana Scriba, a handsome middle-aged woman whose family has gathered for a private meal that includes for the first time the fiancé of her daughter Emma. As the guests debate their topic—“Is it nobler to live for others?”—the butler announces a Miss Boyle, “a tall meager lady…wrapped in a thick plaid shawl, simpering and blinking.” She enters, apologizing, declaring that she’s there but a moment and dare not sit. She was only passing and, but, oh… Juliana, as if speaking to a servant, demands that “Co”—who is her sister—sit down this instant!
Co, short for Corinne, sits and starts to talk. She talks for so long that the entire table stares at her as she eats, her bonnet strings trailing around on the plate. After applying a grandiose adjective to every food item, she takes a “noble” orange and readies to leave. A butler hands her a large basket, and one son is instructed to see “his aunt” out with it. The fiancé is shocked: Aunt? Sister to Juliana? That? He embarks on a long monologue on the evils of celibacy, while the girls ask their mother, “How old is Aunt Co? Forty? Fifty? Seventy-five?” Juliana defends Corinne, but it is useless. They are all deep in discussion of the curse that befalls careless women.