Suggestions for spinsterhood literature/essays

November 7, 2024 6:04 AM

I'm a 40F who upon hearing the election results this week, felt a surge a gratitude about being a spinster. I figure there has to be articles, books, or some type of literature made by fellow spinsters throughout history about their experiences.

I'm a 40F who upon hearing the election results this week, felt a surge a gratitude about having no kids or a male partner. I of course have been on this path for years, mostly due to my total disinterest in dating and or sex. (I didn't realize I was a OG member of the 4B Movement.)
The choice to forego the things that many women consider their purpose in life does make you feel like the weird one.
I figure there has to be articles, books, or some type of literature made by fellow spinsters throughout history about their experiences. It find it a 95 percent positive experience, but I'd also be curious if these ladies have also written about the drawbacks (money troubles, not being anyone's person) as well.
I'd be curious how the stigma played out then as it does now, I figure it was worse then due to not being able to get good jobs, but I know in some places, these women served as elderly caretakers. I look forward to learning more.

posted by greatalleycat to Society & Culture (12 answers total)

The main character is younger and contemporary and men do occasionally pop up in some of the stories (but barely in passing), but Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is basically about a woman living alone, enjoying solitude. The beauty and banality of mundane things. How she's totally in control of her environment and has built her own world. It stuck with me when I read it as a single woman in her 30s and continues to resonate with me now as a 42 year old spinster.

(And also yes, very grateful to be unmarried and child free!)
posted by greta simone at 6:44 AM on November 7 [3 favorites]

This is contemporary and British, and I haven't actually read it yet so can't say anything beyond what's in the blurb, but Self Contained by Emma John might appeal: "Emma is in her 40s; she is neither married, nor partnered, with child or planning to be. In her brilliant new memoir, she asks why the world only views a woman as complete when she is no longer a single figure and addresses what it means to be alone when everyone else isn't."

I'm drawing a blank on more historical examples right now, but might do better later.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 6:53 AM on November 7 [1 favorite]

You might like 'Lolly Willowes' by Sylvia Townshend Warner.

Lolly Willowes is a twenty-eight-year-old spinster when her adored father dies, leaving her dependent upon her brothers and their wives. After twenty years of self-effacement as a maiden aunt, she decides to break free and moves to a small Bedfordshire village. Here, happy and unfettered, she enjoys her new existence nagged only by the sense of a secret she has yet to discover. That secret - and her vocation - is witchcraft, and with her cat and a pact with the Devil, Lolly Willowes is finally free.

Don't be put off by the 'witchcraft' element (no religion in this story), the focus of the narrative remains solely on her experience and delight at being a spinster (with cat, of course).
This book positively, yet subtly, changed my life.
Link to Amazon UK version of the book here
posted by PheasantlySurprised at 6:59 AM on November 7 [8 favorites]

Ah, and I've just happened upon something on Goodreads that might fit the bill. Spinster: A Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick:

Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless - the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 7:14 AM on November 7 [3 favorites]

I remember loving the journals of May Sarton.
posted by attentionplease at 7:24 AM on November 7 [1 favorite]

Living Alone and Loving It by Barbara Feldon (yes, Agent 99)
posted by Rash at 8:08 AM on November 7 [1 favorite]

You might like this piece about a contemporary spinster's love of Barbara Pym's spinsters. And maybe this LARB critique of Spinster: A Life of One's Own with the author's reflections on her own understanding of spinsterhood and favorite reading.
posted by EvaDestruction at 8:34 AM on November 7 [2 favorites]

The jumping off point for A Life of One's Own by Joanna Biggs is her own divorce rather than spinsterhood, but it's a wide ranging memoir that surveys women writers who wrote "alone" in some sense:

In A Life of One’s Own, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante are all taken down from their pedestals, their work and lives seen in a new light. Joanna wanted to learn more about the conditions these women needed to write their best work, and how they addressed the questions she herself was struggling with: Is domesticity a trap? Is life worth living if you have lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman? Why is it so important for women to read one another?

posted by caek at 8:54 AM on November 7

I like Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, which is about the First World War generation of women who didn't marry (the two million "surplus").
posted by paduasoy at 11:15 AM on November 7 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed the Kate Bolick book recommended above. One of the women she writes about might hit the spot for a humorous/historical take - Marjorie Hillis’s Live Alone and Like It, the Classic Guide for the Single Woman. From the publisher’s description:

Though it was 1936 when the Vogue editor first shared her wisdom with her fellow singletons, the tome has been passed lovingly through the generations, and is even more apt today than when it was first published. Hillis, a true bon vivant, was sick and tired of hearing single women carping about their living arrangements and lonely lives; this book is her invaluable wake-up call for single women to take control and enjoy their circumstances.
posted by tinymojo at 11:43 AM on November 7

Indirectly, Cooking in a Bedsitter and Cooking in Ten Minutes.
posted by clew at 11:47 AM on November 8

I figure there has to be articles, books, or some type of literature made by fellow spinsters throughout history

all the single ladies: unmarried women & the rise of an independent nation highlights:

“the evolution the stigmatised ‘spinsters’ of my childhood . . . to the notion of the ‘singularist,’ which is how i would currently define myself at 41”,

goes back to a speech by Susan B. Anthony in 1877 [loc], & references singlewomen in the european past, 1250-1800 [g] when talking about Queen Elizabeth
posted by HearHere at 9:38 PM on November 21