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• Classic-Fiction

“Muzzles for Ladies,” Strand Magazine, no. 8 (1894); W. R. Greg, “Why Are Women Redundant?” Literary and Social Judgments (London: Trubner, 1868); Daniel Defoe, “Satire on Censorious Old Maids,” in William Lee, ed., Daniel Defoe, His Life and Recently Discovered Writing, 3 vols. (1869; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969); Mary Ashton Livermore, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee & Shephard, 1883).

Spinster novels:

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker (1771; New York: Penguin, 1967); Jane Austen, Emma (1816; London: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Sense and Sensibility (1811; New York: Penguin, 1976); Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849; New York: Penguin, 1974), Jane Eyre (1847; New York: Bantam Classics, 1988), and Villette (1853; New York: Bantam, 1986); George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–61; Lon don: Penguin, 1965) and David Copperfield (1849–50; London: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (New York: Penguin, 1981); Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853; London: Penguin, 1976); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Buccaneer Books, 1982).

Twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Sanctuary (New York: Scribner’s, 1903); Edna Ferber, The Girls (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1921); Anne Parrish, The Perennial Bachelor (London: Harper Brothers, 1925); Margaret Ayers Barnes, Within This Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) and Edna, His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Josephine Lawrence, But You Are Young (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), a novel on the “new dependency,” a trend also known as “the piggy family,” and The Tower of Steel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), the story of four single girls in the city, an early version of this familiar genre (one is in flight from her piggy family—“the indecent demands made upon her spiritual privacy”—one commits suicide, and so on); Sophia Belzer Engstrand, Wilma Rogers (New York: Dial Press, 1941) and Miss Munday (New York: Dial Press, 1940); Zona Gale, Faint Perfume (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923); Fanny Hurst, The Lonely Parade (New York: Harper Brothers, 1942); Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born (New York: Scribner’s, 1942); Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Scribner’s, 1911); for the Lily Briscoe character, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland 1909–1912; New York: Pantheon, 1979) and The Yellow Wallpaper (1892; New York: Bantam Classics, 1989); Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York/London: Governeur, D. Appleton and Co., 1943), for the two spinster piano teachers who live off the snacks brought to them or accidentally left by their piano students. Esther Forbes, Miss Marvel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Spinster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).

Theodore Pratt, Miss Dilly Says No (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1945), a little-known spinster novel about a movie-company secretary who writes terrible scripts no one bothers to finish—they’re as dull as she is! Then she writes a memoir of her life as a movie-company secretary, never thinking it might be published. It is. Be comes a best-seller. And so the film companies, her own especially, fight over the rights to make the movie of how idiotic they all are. Miss Dilly, locked up in a hotel room with a starlet bodyguard, repeatedly says “no.” Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (New York: Knopf, 1963) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (New York: Dell, 1966); Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (1942; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) and The Group (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963); Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (New York: Avon, 1985); Anita Brookner, Look at Me (New York; Pantheon, 1983), Hotel Du Lac (New York: Pantheon, 1984), Family and Friends (New York: Pocket, 1985), and Brief Lives (New York: Random House, 1990); Brian Moore, The Lonely