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hardship dealt out to single woman by uncomprehending society, or the privations of
    poverty, chastity and obedience. Their fate, whether chosen or imposed,
    only deepened the pall of prejudice against the spinster. It was the general view (as Monica Baldwin discovered when she re-entered the world after twenty-eight years in an enclosed order) that nunneries ‘. . . were filled with herds of semi-demented spinsters whose repressed and abnormal existences induced a warped unhealthy attitude towards life . . . [they were] unhinged
    old maids . . . who had shuffled off their responsibilities in order to live lives of soured virginity’.
    Prejudice prevailed across the social classes. In the nineteenth century
    some single women in rural areas still endured the stigma of being regarded
    as witches. Contemporary accounts told of bands of unruly spinsters creating mayhem around the countryside – a threat to order and decency. But old maids who persevered in facing their responsibilities still had to endure the often blatant contempt of their neighbours. Robert Roberts, who grew up in a Manchester slum at the turn of the century, remembered how the old
    maids’ best efforts to stay respectable were derailed and undermined by the
    backstreet housewives and their wild children. It was common round
    Roberts’s neighbourhood to find a couple of spinsters sharing a home.
    They were house-proud, as he recalled, and generally kept their steps, doors and windows scrupulously clean, but the married women were merciless.
    The unfortunate spinsters were vilified as ‘old faggots’; they had ‘nothing
    better to do’. And the smug wives turned a blind eye when their children
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    Singled Out
    played evil tricks on the single women and taunted them. ‘Their lives could
    be made a misery – a sort of cruelty that would not be tolerated today.’
    But as Victoria’s influence glimmered dim, a new world for single women
    was flickering into life. Gibson girls, bicycles, Bohemians, the Bloomsbury
    group, The Woman Who Did , shirtwaisters, divorce, H. G. Wells and Olive Schreiner were among the heralds of change. Each confrontation with censorious Victorian society sent shock waves through Kensington and the
    suburbs, but little by little the prison doors were creaking open. As May,
    Gertrude, Vera, Winifred and their contemporaries grew up, the language
    of equality, suffrage, emancipation, pacifism, socialism and agnosticism was starting to filter into the vocabulary.
    For Vera Brittain, brought up in bourgeois Buxton, the new horizons
    on offer made its limitations seem doubly stifling. Vera was ‘mentally
    voracious’ and, as soon as she made the discovery that women’s colleges
    actually existed, set her heart on a university education; she got into Oxford in , but it was not what her parents had planned for her. Their clever daughter had been brought up by them to be an ‘entirely ornamental young
    lady’. As usual, marriage was the be-all and end-all of their ambitions for
    her. ‘It feels sad to be a woman!’ she wrote in . ‘Men seem to have so
    much more choice as to what they are intended for.’
    Twenty years into the twentieth century an unmarried woman had
    possibilities undreamed-of by her spinster aunts. But the aunts, with their
    wispy buns and ruined hopes, were still there to haunt her. The contempt
    and humiliation suffered by maiden ladies were an ever-present reminder
    of the spinster’s predicament. And what made things harder still for Vera
    Brittain and the Surplus Two Million was the feeling that, having lived
    through ‘history’s cruellest catastrophe’, they were now irrelevant, isolated, and figures of fun in the eyes of a rising generation who had sat out the war in schoolrooms. ‘I’m nothing but a piece of wartime wreckage living
    on ingloriously in a world that doesn’t want me!’ wept Vera.
    She was desperately lonely. Having opted to live away from her