The Web of Spinsterhood: Single Women in Fiction (and how they can help us now)

Whatever happened to spinsters? From our 21st century viewpoint they can seem no more than a trace of old lavender water, but Ingham is determined to root them out and show what they can teach us about life today. Eschewing the familiar medium of biography, she chooses to look at single women through the spectrum of fiction. Starting with mythological women from the ancient world, she uses the motif of spinning to identify eighteen different strands of spinsterhood that have woven their way down through the millennia to form the identities of single women over the last three centuries. Having moved deftly through well-known authors such as Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy, and investigated some half-forgotten works by authors such as Th廩phile Gautier and Radclyffe Hall, she turns to 20th century fiction and finally delves into contemporary novels, including those of Kazuo Ishiguro and Jhumpa Lahiri. In the course of her quest she explores the extraordinary lives of single women whose characters include the saint and the sleuth, the scholar and the schemer, the suppressed and the suppressive, the sad and the Sapphic. Even the sinister and the spectral find their place. Finally, she weaves them together into a complex inter-connecting web or tapestry to give us a unique perspective on the larger picture of womanhood today. Cover picture: Miss Tibbins Takes Tea. Original oil painting by Kate Varney.