The Spinster

Available for over a year

Rachel Cooke explores five versions of the single woman. She starts with the spinster, a word which once had positive origins but is nowadays associated with loneliness and unhappiness. To counter these stereotypes, Rachel takes as her starting point George Gissing's 1893 novel The Odd Women, whose heroines are independent and brave. She explores the shift from spinsters as businesswomen, handling their own affairs, to the repressed and downtrodden figures of more recent popular culture, and argues it's time to embrace the word 'odd'.