Singled Out (8 page)

were mysterious, awful, and incomplete. One of the aunts had got ill and

her teeth had started to fall out; despite panic-stricken attempts to shore

them up with bits of bread her looks, and chances, were ruined. Another

one was dancing at her first ball when a young man stepped on her foot.

‘She was laid up for some time, and by the time she recovered it was too

late for marriage.’ The Maiden Aunts lived parsimonious lives in small

London flats with one maid, their distressing existence a baleful warning to avoid such a fate.

The twilight deepened into night for single women who took the veil

as a refuge from the hostility of the outer world. The Church had also for

centuries been an institution which gave sanctuary to society’s outcasts, and these of course included unmarried women. In the Middle Ages families cast off their surplus females into convents. Imprisoned behind grilles, nuns may have wondered which was worse, the alienation and 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



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 family,

Vera now had only the ghosts of her dead brother and dead lover for

companionship. She returned to Oxford after the war, but steered clear of

the other students, instead spending the grey October evenings wandering

alone on Boar’s Hill, before returning to her chilly room ‘at whose door

nobody ever knocked’.

In this morose and de-socialised condition, she found herself sharing

history tutorials with a blonde Valkyrie, strong-featured with intelligent

blue eyes and an athletic figure: Winifred Holtby. The pair got off to an

uneasy start. Vera was prickly and critical and adopted superior airs. There
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’



was a particularly awkward episode when Winifred invited Vera to speak

against her at the Somerville College debating society. She agreed, her

sufferings during the war having made her angry at the limitations of

academe. She made a passionate speech attacking the narrowness of university life, and recommending the ‘school of hard knocks’ as against cloistered insularity. Unfortunately Winifred wittily opposed the criticism

in such a way as to make Vera feel even more superfluous than she already

did, and persuaded the audience to defeat the motion decisively. The

incident left Vera feeling embittered and misunderstood. But from such

inauspicious beginnings friendship grew. Out of the ashes a relationship

was born which was to become for both of them the most intimate and

affectionate of their lives.

*

Winifred Holtby was born in Yorkshire. She was sixteen when war was

declared. Unlike Vera Brittain she neither lost anyone close to her, nor

endured the groans, pain and bandages that constituted Vera’s daily life as

a nurse. But Vera was eventually to marry; Winifred died a spinster.

Winifred’s family had always half-expected her to marry her childhood

friend Harry Pearson. Harry had written poetry to her, and they shared a

love of their Yorkshire roots. Educated, good-looking and patriotic, typical of the public-school officer class, he survived the war and emerged wounded. But then he did nothing. The promising writer who had won

the school prize for English verse quit his Cambridge place and started on

a lifelong career as a drifter, aimlessly travelling, always short of money, a disaffected loner and vagabond. When he turned up, which he did from time to time, Winifred would sympathise and try to help him, but her

vigorous self-sufficiency crushed Harry’s fragile pride. The relationship was on-off; at one point, to her anguish, he got engaged to a pretty pianist, but it was short-lived. Later he and Winifred may have had a brief sexual relationship. She struggled to be non-possessive, but there were days when

she was powerless against his old charm and physical presence. ‘I love every tone of his voice, every movement of his hands. And I wouldn’t
not
love him for anything,’ she wrote to Vera. Though she knew it would never work – she described him to another friend as ‘my-young-man-who-will— never-be-more-than-my-young-man’ – he was the only man who ever

held any attraction for her. But Harry was not to be had. The poetry he

had written to her back in  withered, and after the war he was never

there for her again. Vera Brittain described Harry Pearson as ‘a war casualty of the spirit’.



Singled Out

In Harry’s long absences, Winifred Holtby refused to languish. She was

committed to the cause of internationalism, and lectured widely; she was a

prolific journalist. In many of her writings, but above all in her fiction,

Winifred wrestled with the question of what it meant to be an unmarried

woman, and with her own unresolved and unsatisfactory singleness. Characteristically unshrinking, she harnessed that sense of incompleteness to the cause of her novels. In
The Crowded Street
(), her heroine, Muriel Hammond, grows up in the oppressive small town of Marshington where ‘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. They knit, read improving books and drink cocoa. They are content with little.

Some fictional spinsters are endowed with more sympathetic qualities,

but then they get married, which lets them off the hook. Jane Austen’s

Emma (who swears she never will) is sprightly and life-enhancing, despite

being a thoroughly meddlesome nuisance. But Mr Knightley is more than

equal to her, and their marriage provides both control and contentment.

The lowly Jane Eyre has bravely endured loneliness, grief and poverty with

her self-respect intact. For Jane, plain though she is, love triumphs and



Singled Out

Charlotte Bronte¨ rewards her heroine with the most cathartic of fairytale

endings. ‘Reader, I married him . . .’ is the biggest sigh of relief in English literature. These earlier novels fed the notion that only marriage offered true happiness; they did not dispel the overwhelmingly negative and distorted image that was accepted as a portrayal of the single woman in literature.