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19th-century Yelp review
“Hotels and boarding houses provided food, and were patronized by the more affluent, but Jane Carlyle for one had many complaints about their poor service ... saying, ‘I had to make tea from an urn, the water of which was certainly not as hot as one can drink it; and the cream was blue milk, the butter tasted of straw, and the cold fowl was a lukewarm one, and as tough as leather.’“
From Victorian Women, by Joan Perkin (1993).
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“i had forgotten how hideous it is starting a new job when nobody knows you, so your entire character becomes defined by every chance remark or slightly peculiar thing you say; and you can’t even so much as go to put some makeup on without asking where the ladies’ is.”
From Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding (1996).
“His very humour provides a kind of camouflage”
“‘An innate shyness, or perhaps timidity, restrains him from coming out in the open.”
Malcolm Muggeridge’s description of P. G. Wodehouse; quoted in Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (2004).
P. G. Wodehouse writes a novel in a World War II interment camp
“The novel was written, he explained ... ‘in a room with fifty other men playing darts and ping-pong’, or with German guards looking over his shoulder.”
From Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (2004).
Jeeves and Wooster after World War I
“In this gloomy, neurotic atmosphere, Wodehouse’s light-hearted country-house comedies were both a tonic for bereaved and depressed survivors, and a kind of lunatic elegy for a lost world.”
From Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum (2004).
“We became a self-cuddling people”
“Softness has become one of the American antidotes to fear, environmental crises, and the terror of the world outside our door.”
From Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present, by Hank Stuever (2009).
Impostor syndrome
“She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.”
From The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson (2007); translated by Reg Keeland, 2009.
Superiority complex
“In her own expressed estimation she was exceptionally good-looking, clever, hard-working, accomplished at everything she turned her hand to, and possessed of a charming personality.”
From The Water’s Lovely, by Ruth Rendell (2006).
Irene Litton
“She dressed in draped or trailing clothes in strong jewel colors - garnet-red, sapphire, deep green, or amethyst - mostly with fringes, hung with strings of beads she made herself, and she moved slowly, straight-backed, head held high.”
From The Water’s Lovely, by Ruth Rendell (2006).
The bell jar
“Depression is a disease of loneliness, and anyone who has suffered it acutely knows that it imposes a dread isolation, even for people surrounded by love ...”
From The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (2001).
Paradox
“We have made but small advances in our understanding of depression at the same time that we have made enormous advances in our treatment of depression.”
From The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon (2001).
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“I used to think he was an intelligent man but I’ve had to revise my opinion.”
From The Birthday Present, by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) (2008).
Frenemies
“We call people our friends without thinking how we really feel about them, that actually we fear them or envy them.”
From The Birthday Present, by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell) (2008).
Alternate universe
“She wondered whether some different set of circumstances might not have resulted in her meeting some different man; and she tried to picture those imaginary circumstances, the life they would have brought her, the unknown other husband.”
From Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1857); translated by Francis Steegmuller, 1957.
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“Keith was a good builder in that when he told a householder he would be with her early in the week he meant Tuesday and not Thursday afternoon and when he said he’d be back tomorrow he really did go back, if only for ten minutes.”
From The Rottweiler, by Ruth Rendell (2003).
The idle rich in Jane Austen’s day
“[Bath] is resorted to by many real invalids, but by far the greater number belong to that class who wear away life in a round of fashionable frivolities, without moral aim or intellectual dignity.”
From Jane Austen’s England, by Roy and Lesley Adkins (2013).
All the single ladies
Reading all, or most, of an author’s oeuvre, one discerns patterns: in themes, in the shapes and tendencies of plots, in sympathies and biases. Ngaio Marsh’s 32 Inspector Alleyn mysteries reveal their creator’s attentiveness to the vagaries and peculiarities of human psychology; her lively appreciation for the complexities of the English class system; her admiration for actors and artists; and her ability to devise fiendish ways of killing people. The narrator of these mysteries is consistently good company, standing above and to the side of the action, wearing (one imagines) a bemused smile.
Another pattern emerges about halfway through the series and intensifies as it draws to its end. This pattern involves a stock character: the lonely, unattractive, and sex-starved single woman, the aging spinster attempting without notable success to make her way in a social world that finds her pathetic at best, ridiculous and disgusting at worst.
In Clutch of Constables, published in 1968 when Marsh herself was 73, Agatha “Troy” Alleyn has a visceral reaction to Hazel Rickerby-Carrick: “The more exasperating she became … the sorrier Troy felt for her and the less she desired her company.” Her mingled pity and repulsion are apparent to Miss Rickerby-Carrick herself, who laments in her diary her own tendency to “try too hard.” This poor creature follows a string of similar characters in the Alleyn books. In Overture to Death (1939), we meet Miss Campanula (“a large arrogant spinster with a firm bust, a high-coloured complexion, coarse grey hair, and enormous bony hands”) and Miss Prentice (“a thin, colourless woman of perhaps forty-nine years”); these two are close friends and bitter rivals. Miss Campanula flings herself at the local rector, who describes the incident as “the most awful thing that has ever happened to me” but ascribes it to her being one of a “rather common type of church worker”: “ladies who are not perhaps very young and who have no other interests.” In Dead Water (1963), there is Miss Elspeth Cost, “a lady with vague hair and a tentative smile,” who is described by another character as “a manhunter”: “In her quiet, mousy sort of fashion, she raged to and fro seeking whom she might devour. Which was not many.” There are the three title characters of Spinsters in Jeopardy (1955), whose interchangeability forms the basis of the plot; someone observes that “all English spinsters have teeth like mares.” Looking at one of them, Inspector Alleyn notices “the other stigmata of her kind: the small mole, the lines and pouches, the pathetic tufts of grey hair from which the skin had receded.” Between the descriptions of physical flaws and the implication that menopause brings with it an insatiable sexual appetite, between the pity and the scorn, the position of these women in the social world of the novels is clear, and by extension the position of women in general: valued only for their appearance and their connection with men.
There are counter-examples, to be sure. Miss Emily Pride, in Dead Water, is single and thoroughly admirable, an elderly lady who has made her living teaching French to diplomats. There is Troy herself, an accomplished painter, who only reluctantly agrees to give up her independence and marry Alleyn. Troy is a close parallel to Harriet Vane in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Wimsey novels, another self-supporting artistic woman who marries Lord Peter after a long, persistent courtship. Lord Peter occasionally collaborates with a Miss Climpson, a brisk businesslike lady who runs a kind of temp agency and who goes undercover in Unnatural Death (1927), finding herself back in a life she had escaped, a “long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses.”
There are three reasons why this preponderance of sadly single women interests me. One is the historical fact that there must have been quite a lot of them about during Marsh’s lifetime: the two world wars killed a huge number of young men, leaving two succeeding generations of European women with a depleted pool of marriageable men. The novels of Barbara Pym, younger than Marsh by eighteen years but a rough contemporary in literary terms, are full of single women; other characters look down on them, while they themselves face their situations with a mixture of stoicism and hopelessness. Without marriage and children, they’re considered worthless and purposeless; they’re expected to compete in demeaning ways for men; they dread the approach of old age and even greater marginalization. These authors are describing something they know and feel, something they dread and therefore can’t stop analyzing. The numbers of “redundant women” were officially a social problem in the nineteenth century and became one again when the world wars decimated the male population. Attention was certainly being paid to the situation. But the attention did little or nothing for individual women whose practical difficulties were exacerbated by relentless social disapproval and ridicule.
The second reason for my interest in these characters lies in Marsh’s own history and personality. She herself never married; some biographers have speculated that she was a lesbian, pointing to her long, loving friendship with Sylvia Fox and her rather brief and cryptic references to love affairs in her autobiography. I don’t think it’s necessary to resolve the question of her sexuality to address the matter of the single women in her fiction. Her choosing not to marry, and her portrayal of single women, together indicate a kind of determination to be different from them, to live as she chose and to avoid becoming ridiculous; she wanted to resemble Miss Pride or Miss Climpson in their self-sufficiency and competence. Miss Rickerby-Carrick’s unhappiness and awkwardness, after all, arise from her “trying too hard” – her attempts to please others (all of which fail), her seeming inability to be natural, her persistent sense that she is offending merely by existing. She proclaims in her diary that “the body is beautiful,” and then goes on: “Only mine isn’t so very”; so she sunbathes in a hidden corner of a boat deck. Her longing for connection with Troy only repulses the latter, as we have seen; she has no dignity, no sense of herself as a unique and valuable individual – no boundaries, as we would say now. Marsh portrays all of this with a kind of cool compassion – showing us this character’s faults, and showing us at the same time that she is to be pitied rather than condemned. But there is also an emphatic distance. Marsh herself would never behave this way, would never wear her vulnerability on her sleeve. She had a thriving career in the theater and dozens of friends; she travelled, she wrote, she socialized with fascinating people and nurtured many young careers. She was far from pitiable. Yet she must have been aware of how precarious her social place was, as a single woman living by her wits. She must also have been aware of the particular challenges facing women as they navigated through a double set of expectations: those of class, and those of sex. Her novels delineate the difficulties of this task and the resourcefulness it demanded from women even in seemingly innocuous circumstances.
The third reason has to do with the persistence in Western culture of the pressure on women to marry. See, for example, Lori Gottlieb’s article in the March 2008 issue of the Atlantic, “Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough.” (After you read that one, read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article for the July/August 2012 issue of the same magazine, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”) To paraphrase a big part of feminist theory: Why would society feel the need to pressure us to do something, if we were naturally or innately inclined to do it anyway? Until very recently, marriage has not been a wonderful deal for women, even in the industrialized West. It’s no coincidence that the divorce rate in the US spiked in the 1970s, when women no longer needed to accept unequal or unhappy marriages in order to survive economically. Marriage as an institution has probably benefited from this; when people freely choose to enter and sustain a union, rather than doing so under coercion, the marriage in question is stronger and others are more likely to see it as an example worth following. Conversely, when marriage is a choice and not a mandate, those who choose not to marry are no longer seen as outliers or threats to the social order; they are simply individuals making their own choices. It’s a good thing that the pressure is fading, but it’s far from gone.
Perhaps we’re nearing the end (in certain places and groups, anyway) of the unmarried woman as a figure of fun. Perhaps when we meet one, we can start with the assumption that she freely chose that state and is happy in it, rather than supposing that her situation originated from a fault or failing of her own, or that she would do almost anything to escape it. And while we’re at it, we can extend this benign set of beliefs to everyone we meet, reserving our judgment about them until we know more about their individual characters, needs, and goals. We can treat a social interaction as a chance to observe and learn, rather than a reason to feel superior or to retreat further inside our own defenses. We can read other people the way we read fiction, with close attentiveness and an eagerness to find out what comes next.
A novel in a sentence
“‘There is,’ wrote Miss Rickerby-Carrick, ‘no bottom, none, to my unquenchable infamy.’“
From Clutch of Constables, by Ngaio Marsh (1968).