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By Root 1385 0

to seem “older,” meaning tired and likely to complain. More mature spinsters took custom sewing or quilting assignments known as “out work.” When they could. The competition was intense, there was never enough work to begin with, and many were forced to quit. A few daring misses took more public positions in small token or “cent” shops, but the large majority moved in with former employers or distant relatives, who supplied room and board in exchange for household work and child care. Those without any connections advertised. Governess, companion, nurse, fine seamstress—these positions would be pinned onto the spinster’s image like a wilted, brown-edged corsage.

Among the castaways were hundreds of unlucky upper-class girls. In some cases they’d been orphaned and their family homes lost to male relatives through the machinations of British inheritance laws. And some stood to lose prospective mates. With the industrial revolution, it had become common practice among the upper classes to postpone marriage until the groom had established himself financially. But in both Europe and the United States, many men had quickly learned to live well as bachelors, renting private rooms, joining private clubs, taking mistresses. Now, when the intended had suffered so drastic a setback, there was even less urgency to wed. As one MP put it, “Before us lies the disaster we have…watched coming. A girl who has trained for the arts of wifehood…schooled in the gracious arts, who fails so much as to wed? We witness the unfolding of a tragical redundant class.”

These perceived changes were amply documented in the 1851 British census. It seemed that there were in England 405,000 more women than men, creating a surplus in all segments of the female population.* Known as redundant or superfluous women, they officially became a social problem, and one with no easy remedy. Those who worked would compete for a limited number of jobs. And there were those who could not quite bring themselves to work. The pamphlet Dedicated to the Refined Young Lady, reprinted consistently from 1860 to 1905, dictated that one might make her way, without loss of station, in lace making, fancy needlework, or as a “paid reading partner.” She might also, under an assumed name, sell canned jams and jellies, write love stories for magazines, or give “dramatic readings.” The pursuit of an actual job, however, was impossible, for to work in an office, “to stamp envelopes…would greatly decrease the likelihood of marriage.” The better girl might work “for cake” but not “for bread.” (It should also be said that this girl might not be cut out to do real work of any kind. The résumé of Mattie Silver, the central female character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, typifies the situation: “Her equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite ‘The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,’ and play ‘The Lost Chord,’ and a pot-pourri from ‘Carmen.’”)

Yet many, of course, were left with few choices. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were among those who routinely made visits to local “intelligence,” or employment, offices to apply for the scant number of jobs hundreds had applied for already. In Charlotte’s case, the jobs she eventually secured provided background and details for three of the most complex single heroines in all literature: the stoical Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone of Shirley (1849), and, my favorite, Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853), a boarding-school teacher so fiercely self-contained—she has suffered a severe trauma she cannot speak of—that Jane Eyre, in comparison, seems like a gay lady at Mr. Rochester’s house party. When left alone at the school during a holiday, Lucy suffers one of the most realistic nervous breakdowns in all literature. If not strictly autobiographical, this episode suggests that the author at a young age knew the misery of enforced, impenetrable solitude.

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, intending to praise Charlotte Brontë, that she was “that fiery little eager brave…tremulous creature!” As he explained,