(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Paul H. Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1994). Godey’s Ladies Book, founded in 1830, became the premiere women’s magazine, the model for all others, throughout the nineteenth century. Stories, lectures, allegories, storiettes I used in research: “Woman” (1831), “An Old Maid” (1831), “Husband Hunters” (1832), “The Bachelor’s Dream” (1832), “Mary, the Prude” (1832), “Female Accomplishments” (1835), “Female Education” (1835), “Women at Twenty-one” (1835). Books on Godey’s include: Ruth Finley, The Lady of Godey’s, Sara Josepha Hale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931). Also, on magazines: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, reprinted and updated, 1938–68).
CHAPTER 1: THE CLASSICAL SPINSTER
Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Women and Community for Single Women, 1850– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), a wonderful study of women in England and their attempts to live communally in the mid to late nineteenth century; Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Working from four famous novels the author charts a fascinating and original thesis on societal responses to women living in groups. See also: Pauline Nestor, Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Sheila Jeffries, The Spinster and Her Enemies 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), is the best work published on 1920s-era sexology and its long-term detrimental effect on single women. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780– 1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) stands as the pioneering and intensive work on early single revolutionaries dubbed “the Singly Blessed”; Susan Leslie Katz, “Singleness of Heart: Spinsterhood in Victorian Culture” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1990).
Dorothy Yost Deegan, The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Literature: A Social Study with Implications for the Education of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951), is the seminal work on the spinster in novels. The book received much popular attention because of what I’ll call its news peg: There were, or so it seemed, a large number of single women in the population, and one had to study them in historical context and, with an unavoidable 1950s bias, determine what they might do to “adjust” to their status. The author concluded there was much a spinster might do in modern society, as opposed to most of the sad women she wrote about. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2d ed. (1980; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Susan Koppelman, Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1984); Laura L. Doan, Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Journal of Feminist Studies/Critical Studies Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
On Florence Nightingale:
I. B. O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 1820–1856: A Study of Her Life Down to the End of the Crimean War (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931); Nightingale had the distinction of being the lone woman included in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1918) and the far more unfortunate distinction of being viewed in it as a repressed sexual hysteric. Florence Nightingale to Her Nurses: A Selection from Miss Nightingale’s Addresses to Probationers and Nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s Hospital (London: Macmillan, 1914). There is an excellent discussion of Florence Nightingale in Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913); Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: Atheneum, 1983). Myra Stark, ed., Cassandra (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979).
On Louisa May Alcott:
Ednah D. Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1890); Sarah Elbert, ed., Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
On Clara Barton:
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); William E. Barton, The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1969).
Conduct books and nasty warnings:
Ann Judith Penny, The Afternoon of Unmarried Life (London: Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858); Mrs. Ellis (Sarah Stickney), The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1842); Myrtle Reed, The Spinster Book (New York and London: G. P. Putnam/Knickerbocker Press, 1905); Susan C. Dunning Power, The Ugly Girl Papers, or, Hints for the Toilet (New York: Harper Brothers, 1875); Robert Tomes, The Bazar Book of Decorum (New York: Harper Brothers, 1877); Eliza Leslie, The Behaviour Book: A Manual for Ladies (New York: Willis P. Hazard, 1854).
“Muzzles for Ladies,” Strand Magazine, no. 8 (1894); W. R. Greg, “Why Are Women Redundant?” Literary and Social Judgments (London: Trubner, 1868); Daniel Defoe, “Satire on Censorious Old Maids,” in William Lee, ed., Daniel Defoe, His Life and Recently Discovered Writing, 3 vols. (1869; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969); Mary Ashton Livermore, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee & Shephard, 1883).
Spinster novels:
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker (1771; New York: Penguin, 1967); Jane Austen, Emma (1816; London: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Sense and Sensibility (1811; New York: Penguin, 1976); Charlotte Bronte, Shirley (1849; New York: Penguin, 1974), Jane Eyre (1847; New York: Bantam Classics, 1988), and Villette (1853; New York: Bantam, 1986); George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–61; Lon don: Penguin, 1965) and David Copperfield (1849–50; London: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (New York: Penguin, 1981); Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853; London: Penguin, 1976); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Buccaneer Books, 1982).
Twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Sanctuary (New York: Scribner’s, 1903); Edna Ferber, The Girls (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1921); Anne Parrish, The Perennial Bachelor (London: Harper Brothers, 1925); Margaret Ayers Barnes, Within This Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) and Edna, His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Josephine Lawrence, But You Are Young (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), a novel on the “new dependency,” a trend also known as “the piggy family,” and The Tower of Steel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), the story of four single girls in the city, an early version of this familiar genre (one is in flight from her piggy family—“the indecent demands made upon her spiritual privacy”—one commits suicide, and so on); Sophia Belzer Engstrand, Wilma Rogers (New York: Dial Press, 1941) and Miss Munday (New York: Dial Press, 1940); Zona Gale, Faint Perfume (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923); Fanny Hurst, The Lonely Parade (New York: Harper Brothers, 1942); Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born (New York: Scribner’s, 1942); Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Scribner’s, 1911); for the Lily Briscoe character, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland 1909–1912; New York: Pantheon, 1979) and The Yellow
