Read Online Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson - Free Book Online Page B

‘the only thing that mattered was marriage . . .’ Muriel’s long lonely path
    in coming to terms with singleness must have mirrored her author’s own
    dark nights of the soul, when dread of the twilight state of aunthood could
    bring her to the brink of despair:
    ‘Nobody wants me – I’m like Aunt Beatrice, living in fear of an unloved old
    age. I must have some reason for living. I must, I must. I can’t bear to live without.
    I just can’t bear it. Oh, what am I going to do with myself ?’
    A later novel, South Riding (), tells the story of an enterprising headmistress, Sarah Burton, who falls stormily in love with an unavailable man who is also her political opponent. But Sarah’s love affair with Robert
    Carne is thwarted, her hungry longing violently disrupted at the point
    when it is about to be consummated. Robert comes to her bed, but before
    anything can happen suffers a terrifying heart attack; shortly afterwards
    his horse rears on a clifftop and he is killed in the fall. The great question of Holtby’s story is, how will Sarah herself survive? Despair threatens to engulf her:
    I cannot bear it, she repeated to herself. I do not want to live . . .
    She suffered not only sorrow; she suffered shame. If he had loved me, even for an hour, she sometimes thought, this would not have been unendurable.
    Winifred Holtby never pretended it was easy. In an essay she wrote in
    * she stared her own prospects as a spinster in the face:
    What am I missing? What experience is this without which I must – for I am told so – walk frustrated? Am I growing embittered, narrow, prudish? Are my nerves giving way, deprived of natural relaxation? Shall I suffer horribly in middle age?
    At the moment, life seems very pleasant; but I am an uncomplete frustrated virgin * ‘Are Spinsters Frustrated?’ in Women and a Changing Civilization ().
    ‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
    
    woman. Therefore some time, somewhere, pain and regret will overwhelm me.
    The psychologists, lecturers and journalists all tell me so. I live under the shadow of a curse.
    Holtby’s books are about coming to terms with being alone – but they
    are also about community, about personal serenity, and about refusal to
    compromise. She herself was courageous and unflinching, and her spinster
    heroines travel beyond the confines of a quest for personal happiness. For
    many ‘surplus’ readers in the s and s remembering their own
    anguish and frustration, her writings must have brought a sense that this
    author was their champion.
    Odd women and Ann Veronicas
    And a champion was needed for the single woman, whose image, by the
    s, had become stuck in a literary time-warp. The aunts – ‘living in fear of an unloved old age . . .’ – haunt the pages of Holtby’s novels, but they are strewn across British fiction. There is Miss Matty, lace-capped, genteel and economical in Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford ; there are the Miss Maddens, faded, plain and poor in George Gissing’s The Odd Women ; then Miss Miniver, dingy, pinched and petulant in H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica ; or Rachel Vinrace’s twittering, unimaginative spinster aunts in Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out . Sad, prudish Miss Prism and her three-volume novel are objects of ridicule in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest . Charles Dickens specialised in spinsters. There is Miss Havisham in her cobwebbed wedding dress, wreaking eternal vengeance on mankind for her wrecked hopes, and
    the lunatic Miss Flite in Bleak House . In David Copperfield there is the tyrannical Miss Murdstone and in Dombey and Son the obsequious Miss Tox – all of them grotesque, laughable and lonely. Yet more bloodless specimens haunt the pages of Trollope, Henry James and E. M. Forster. As
    a breed these spinsters are shabby, sallow, petty, sour and queer. Their lives are dominated by hopeless longing and hard struggle.