Despite some quotes on its cover, books about being a committed single woman are probably something of a niche. For context this reviewer--like Kate Bolick--has never married, is childless, and in somewhat retro-fashion likes to prefix herself as Miss where applicable. Bolick (in her 43rd year when "Spinster" came out in 2015) goes one better and attempts to reclaim her book's title as a badge of honour. And in an echo of one of Miss Bolick's personal recollections, your reviewer spent her student days dreaming of and plotting how to arrange things so that she could live alone in the city as soon as possible. She (reviewer) is still living that dream a couple of decades on, and the dream hasn't changed and probably won't. Miss Bolick's subject is a therefore keen interest of hers, and actually always has been.
In America, singledom for women had something of a heyday a century or so ago, with 34% of the female population unmarried in 1890. The origin of this trend, concentrated in New England, was a spike in the female / male ratio wrought by the Civil War of 25 years prior. The statistic declined to 17% in 1960 and since then has vaulted back to 53% in 2013 (this is Miss Bolick's finding from census data). Today it is driven by different and more durable influences. But all iterations of the spinster over the years have considered her to be something of an anomaly, and usually defined by what she lacks. The book exudes Miss Bolick's infectious energy in living and recounting the reverse. "What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought?"
That does not characterise Miss Bolick's own path though. Through most of the book, the author intersperses a personal account of a persistent impulse forever compelling her to (and back to) single status, in between mini biographies of five female writers, from the prior single-girl-era, that she calls her awakeners. Each of them had a posthumous hand in kindling an aspect of Miss Bolick's personal yearning, which was to discover who she would be if she actively chose to be alone. It's a desire that gleefully reveals itself every few pages even as she struggles to know its source, while around her she only sees women "leading lives I didn't want for myself". The awakener women provide Miss Bolick with pieces of a vision, her "spinster wish" that she is "in thrall to, in ways [she doesn't] know how to articulate".
This spinster wish frequently sparkles: "to choose not to do something so normal [as marriage / motherhood] would require a very good explanation which I certainly didn't have", yet Bolick's compulsion is irrepressible nonetheless, crystallised in the alluring snippets she curates from what she learns about her heroines, like Maeve Brennan, Irish emigrant story-writer and the first of Bolick's five, whose accounts of sitting alone in crowded Manhattan diners clearly excite the author. When twenty-something Miss Bolick herself first arrives to live/work in New York (though not alone at first), she lives for her morning solitary commute amid subway and street bustle. She discovers works of Neith Boyce, a novelist for whom single life was a resolute deliberate choice from her youth, and who did the same relocation from Boston a century prior and established herself through "The Bachelor Girl", a column in Vogue. Apparently Boyce's aim was not only to live an independent life, but to "convince the world that she is possible"; Miss Bolick's spinster wish pre-enacted.
Miss Bolick suffers periodic self-doubt over whether she is genuinely armed with enough to be a born bachelor girl, in contrast to her perceptions (which are probably part fantasy) of her idols who convince, through their writing, that they assumed the identity without a tremor. In her late twenties the notion of being alone at forty still apparently frightened Miss Bolick. The author's romantic relationships, almost seamless and spanning a few years each, and precluding her from actually living solo until 2001 (her 29th year) are recounted ultimately as hindrances to her craving to be on her own. A one-time account of her returning, newly single, to her one-bedroom in the early hours where "waiting for me at home was nothing but an empty bed into which I'd crawl" is evidently a peak-experience milestone.
Poet Edna Millay's appearance in the narrative includes a sexually progressive member of Miss Bolick's "dead spinsters' project", but this aspect seems to be an exception; one of the more enduring aspects of her influencers is their asexuality, or more accurately the extreme lack of relevance of their dating life (though none of the Bolick five avoided marriage completely).
For Miss Bolick's personal account though, her lovers' appearances (they are all referred to as initials: W, R, D etc) seem to follow a repeated cycle in which they all ultimately stifle her quest, and she eventually wakes up, groundhog-day style, realising "I was nowhere near where [my] life was taking place". The reader presumes that their relevance in this quest is significant, though it is never particularly examined beyond statements like "coupling, I realised, can encourage a fairly static way of being" and "my complete lack of agency" or "I still wasn't living my own life". She claims to be introvert (needing a lot of time alone to reflect) and extravert (energised by interaction), or as she terms it, a social aloner--living alone amid like-minded people. This simultaneously describes the environment of a convent and that of Greenwich Village, Manhattan.
Miss Bolick's final two awakeners, Edith Wharton (first girl Pulitzer winner) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (writer and reforming activist ) earn their place in her gallery for different reasons. Ms Wharton didn't start single life until she was fifty, it being described as eventual victory in a very deliberate personal endeavour. Miss Perkins Gilman "resolved never to marry", except that she did, twice, but these are recounted as temporary diversions that are excused for a woman "so true to her own compass that she could break the rules she made for herself without compromising her ideals". The latter's example appears to induce greater comfort with solitude in the by-now-late-thirties Miss Bolick.
She concludes her delectable book with a summation of being unlimited by gender, or as in a quote from one of her awakeners "my self as a self, not merely as a woman or that useful animal a wife and mother". That jarred with most of the text for this reviewer though, as up to that conclusion the excitement relayed of single womanhood is surely inseparable from its second word. "Spinster" is quite far from being a social commentary, but quite close to being a celebration of the many trappings, opportunities and uniquenesses of female autonomy, and a somewhat convoluted journey to the eventual championing of aloneness, personified in Miss Bolick's first solo dwelling in Brooklyn: "pleasurable solitude incarnate". In short, her book is a wonderful indulgence.
In America, singledom for women had something of a heyday a century or so ago, with 34% of the female population unmarried in 1890. The origin of this trend, concentrated in New England, was a spike in the female / male ratio wrought by the Civil War of 25 years prior. The statistic declined to 17% in 1960 and since then has vaulted back to 53% in 2013 (this is Miss Bolick's finding from census data). Today it is driven by different and more durable influences. But all iterations of the spinster over the years have considered her to be something of an anomaly, and usually defined by what she lacks. The book exudes Miss Bolick's infectious energy in living and recounting the reverse. "What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought?"
That does not characterise Miss Bolick's own path though. Through most of the book, the author intersperses a personal account of a persistent impulse forever compelling her to (and back to) single status, in between mini biographies of five female writers, from the prior single-girl-era, that she calls her awakeners. Each of them had a posthumous hand in kindling an aspect of Miss Bolick's personal yearning, which was to discover who she would be if she actively chose to be alone. It's a desire that gleefully reveals itself every few pages even as she struggles to know its source, while around her she only sees women "leading lives I didn't want for myself". The awakener women provide Miss Bolick with pieces of a vision, her "spinster wish" that she is "in thrall to, in ways [she doesn't] know how to articulate".
This spinster wish frequently sparkles: "to choose not to do something so normal [as marriage / motherhood] would require a very good explanation which I certainly didn't have", yet Bolick's compulsion is irrepressible nonetheless, crystallised in the alluring snippets she curates from what she learns about her heroines, like Maeve Brennan, Irish emigrant story-writer and the first of Bolick's five, whose accounts of sitting alone in crowded Manhattan diners clearly excite the author. When twenty-something Miss Bolick herself first arrives to live/work in New York (though not alone at first), she lives for her morning solitary commute amid subway and street bustle. She discovers works of Neith Boyce, a novelist for whom single life was a resolute deliberate choice from her youth, and who did the same relocation from Boston a century prior and established herself through "The Bachelor Girl", a column in Vogue. Apparently Boyce's aim was not only to live an independent life, but to "convince the world that she is possible"; Miss Bolick's spinster wish pre-enacted.
Miss Bolick suffers periodic self-doubt over whether she is genuinely armed with enough to be a born bachelor girl, in contrast to her perceptions (which are probably part fantasy) of her idols who convince, through their writing, that they assumed the identity without a tremor. In her late twenties the notion of being alone at forty still apparently frightened Miss Bolick. The author's romantic relationships, almost seamless and spanning a few years each, and precluding her from actually living solo until 2001 (her 29th year) are recounted ultimately as hindrances to her craving to be on her own. A one-time account of her returning, newly single, to her one-bedroom in the early hours where "waiting for me at home was nothing but an empty bed into which I'd crawl" is evidently a peak-experience milestone.
Poet Edna Millay's appearance in the narrative includes a sexually progressive member of Miss Bolick's "dead spinsters' project", but this aspect seems to be an exception; one of the more enduring aspects of her influencers is their asexuality, or more accurately the extreme lack of relevance of their dating life (though none of the Bolick five avoided marriage completely).
For Miss Bolick's personal account though, her lovers' appearances (they are all referred to as initials: W, R, D etc) seem to follow a repeated cycle in which they all ultimately stifle her quest, and she eventually wakes up, groundhog-day style, realising "I was nowhere near where [my] life was taking place". The reader presumes that their relevance in this quest is significant, though it is never particularly examined beyond statements like "coupling, I realised, can encourage a fairly static way of being" and "my complete lack of agency" or "I still wasn't living my own life". She claims to be introvert (needing a lot of time alone to reflect) and extravert (energised by interaction), or as she terms it, a social aloner--living alone amid like-minded people. This simultaneously describes the environment of a convent and that of Greenwich Village, Manhattan.
Miss Bolick's final two awakeners, Edith Wharton (first girl Pulitzer winner) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (writer and reforming activist ) earn their place in her gallery for different reasons. Ms Wharton didn't start single life until she was fifty, it being described as eventual victory in a very deliberate personal endeavour. Miss Perkins Gilman "resolved never to marry", except that she did, twice, but these are recounted as temporary diversions that are excused for a woman "so true to her own compass that she could break the rules she made for herself without compromising her ideals". The latter's example appears to induce greater comfort with solitude in the by-now-late-thirties Miss Bolick.
She concludes her delectable book with a summation of being unlimited by gender, or as in a quote from one of her awakeners "my self as a self, not merely as a woman or that useful animal a wife and mother". That jarred with most of the text for this reviewer though, as up to that conclusion the excitement relayed of single womanhood is surely inseparable from its second word. "Spinster" is quite far from being a social commentary, but quite close to being a celebration of the many trappings, opportunities and uniquenesses of female autonomy, and a somewhat convoluted journey to the eventual championing of aloneness, personified in Miss Bolick's first solo dwelling in Brooklyn: "pleasurable solitude incarnate". In short, her book is a wonderful indulgence.