The headline reads "Chance for a Spinster" and though "spinster" is mostly used as insult now, at the time he was just trying to call out all the single ladies.
|
|
SPINSTER: Making a Life of One's Own, by Kate Bolick.
|
|
The Ariah Park Bachelor and Spinster Ball had officially begun.
|
|
Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Spinster.
|
|
"I'm a spinster, aren't I, and spinsters live alone," she reasons. Ugh.
|
|
Snapshot: Above, a scene from a Bachelor and Spinster ball in Australia.
|
|
Next week we are reading Daniel Mallory Ortberg's short story collection Merry Spinster.
|
|
Mallory is the author of Texts from Jane Eyre and The Merry Spinster.
|
|
Recommended by: MJ. Next up, we're reading Daniel Mallory Ortberg's book Merry Spinster.
|
|
"I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe," she wrote.
|
|
There's the confirmed rake, the bluestocking spinster, the runaway bride, the runaway dog.
|
|
The stories in The Merry Spinster are at times haunting, often funny, mostly strange.
|
|
In The Merry Spinster, you're reinventing stories that most of us know by heart.
|
|
Some, including Spinster editions from 1915, 1950, 1969, and 1985, did include racist depictions.
|
|
"She's taller than Emma; she's in Emma's way; she's a spinster," de Wilde said.
|
|
Spinster, singlewoman, or singleton: None of those terms openly refers to an absent partner.
|
|
This is the key to Austen's transformation from little known spinster-scribbler to literary superstar.
|
|
"I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe," as she put it.
|
|
Louisa May Alcott could be a spinster, but the same was not true for her heroine.
|
|
And, in keeping with liberalized expectations of women, the spinster character is no longer twenty-seven.
|
|
"Beauty Queen," the story of an Irish spinster and her manipulative mother, begins performances on Jan.
|
|
He has returned for a woman — Ona, considered a spinster and made pregnant by a rape.
|
|
On December 21st 1908 Marion Gilchrist, a wealthy spinster, was bludgeoned to death with a blunt instrument.
|
|
The fairy tales collected in The Merry Spinster are as bright and sharp and painful as knives.
|
|
Miss Marple is an amateur detective, perpetually overlooked by law enforcement because she is an elderly spinster.
|
|
"When was the last time you read about a divorced, childless man referred to as a spinster?"
|
|
When was the last time you read about a divorced, childless man referred to as a spinster?
|
|
First Comes Snapchat, Then the Bachelor and Spinster Ball: In the cities, technology has transformed social life.
|
|
What could be more damaging to a heroine's legacy than the thought of an old spinster dying alone?
|
|
Then, inspired by The Merry Spinster, we talk about our favorite books that riff off of fairy tales.
|
|
I can't even really describe this outfit other than like spinster aunt horseback-riding instructor, but even worse.
|
|
"She's perceived as a spinster recluse who wanted her poems burned upon death," Shannon, 54, told Entertainment Weekly.
|
|
In April, Kate Bolick's Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own was a New York Times best seller.
|
|
You think I'm a lonely spinster who takes care of my parents, but I have had my passions.
|
|
And, in fact, they were just like spinster sisters in a fairy tale, their kindness teetering on strangeness.
|
|
Books like Spinster and All the Single Ladies are devoted to dismantling the idea that singledom automatically means doom.
|
|
A feminist isn't a man-hating, curmudgeonly spinster who lives out her days in her apartment with 43 cats.
|
|
Marie Mullen, who won a Tony in 1998 for her performance as the spinster, Maureen, will now play the mother.
|
|
We send it to all the strong women and gentle men, to the old faggot uncles and silent spinster aunts.
|
|
Ms. Groff's Isabella, dressed to resemble a Tennessee Williams spinster, and Mr. Sargeant's Claudio speak their exchange plainly and slowly.
|
|
Andrew sought a mother for his children, and Abby, considered a spinster at 37, longed to leave her crowded home.
|
|
"Listen, girls, there's nothing left in my orchard except firewood," Ms. Suleiman said, using a Palestinian saying for being a spinster.
|
|
I didn't want to be the angry spinster banging on the ceiling with a broom while her neighbors had sex upstairs.
|
|
To tarry as a "bachelor" or "spinster" past the age of 35 is to enter a doubtful, dreary no man's land.
|
|
Feel like you need to get out a little more, for fear of becoming an alcoholic spinster cat lady (or man)?
|
|
Lizzie Borden, a seemingly proper spinster from a wealthy family, was the primary suspect, but an all-male jury acquitted her.
|
|
Two spinster sisters lived at Edgemont: when one of them died, the survivor painted the entire house black, inside and out.
|
|
Equally won over is Sophie (Julianne Nicholson), the town spinster, though more by the newcomer's shirtless physique and way with watercolors.
|
|
She was an unwed spinster by traditional standards — but she considered herself twice married, at least in a spiritual sense, to women.
|
|
The Merry Spinster is a collection of short stories, each that riff off of the classic fairy tales you read as kids.
|
|
His curmudgeonly father (also Mr. Belton, although you'd never guess it) disapproves, and Andrey's spinster sister Mary (Gelsey Bell) remains chilly, too.
|
|
Pets Everyone knows the stereotype of the lonely spinster with a gajillion cats, but according to the numbers, families have more critters.
|
|
Is that because Kafka, the alienated Czech Jew, is perceived to be apocalyptic, yet the provincial spinster "Jane" cannot possibly be that?
|
|
For instance, Rosemary is often played as a caricature of the archetypal sad, lascivious spinster, but Ms. Skinner finds her desperate pathos.
|
|
Emily, more mercurial, knowing in her cultivated spinster image, and now wearing exclusively white, has become the very thing she dreads: embittered.
|
|
The narrator of The Giant's House, too, thinks romance has passed her by, and happily considers herself a "spinster" until love shows up.
|
|
We're missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.
|
|
Whenever it was she met Bumpa, she would have been considered a spinster with a questionable past, whatever the distinction conferred by her heritage.
|
|
Where Christie's spinster killed her pregnant ward because she disapproved of fallen women, the TV version does it because of her repressed lesbian desires.
|
|
Mocked by her contemporaries as a "white-blooded spinster," though she is just in her 20s, Alma is one of Williams's most complicated creatures.
|
|
It is the perfect plant to lend to a mildly depressed spinster with a black thumb, a black heart and nothing else to do.
|
|
" Forster, diagnosing "the effects of weakness," leaned to the latter view: "We realize with pain that we are listening to a slightly tiresome spinster.
|
|
Bachelor and Spinster balls — or B&S balls, a fixture in the country since the 1880s, with about 30 each year — aim to help.
|
|
At 22, Eva dreaded the idea of having to spend her life as the village spinster, the girl no one had wanted to marry.
|
|
She was 27, almost spinster age by traditional Syrian standards, and she was told her 38-year-old Turkish suitor was well-off and single.
|
|
Since then, Ortberg has become the voice of Slate's Dear Prudence advice column while also writing The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, out now.
|
|
Referring to somebody as a spinster or "confirmed bachelor" was a coy implication of queerness, but it's also a signpost for the childfree of yesteryear.
|
|
In Siegel's version, the women are cast to type as slut, spinster, servant and so on, as if they represented the spectrum of female humanity.
|
|
What we have just seen is the result of Kenne spending two years traveling across rural Australia visiting what are called Bachelor and Spinster Balls.
|
|
The term spinster transitioned from describing an occupation that employed many women — a spinner of wool — to a legal term for an independent, unmarried woman.
|
|
Jo, who'd always vowed to become a spinster and drawn power from her stubborn sense of independence, is now questioning all the choices she's made.
|
|
It's shamemongering that corrals women into partnering up — and be quick about it — because you don't want to end up like her, the spinster, do you?
|
|
In The Merry Spinster, the Little Mermaid is not a red-haired singing princess, but an evil swamp creature who has no respect for human values.
|
|
Despite a campaign by the chemical industry to discredit Ms. Carson's research and dismiss her as a Communist-sympathizing spinster, the presidential report corroborated her claims.
|
|
When it suits her, she can be charming, but, to the poor spinster, Miss Bates, she is coldly polite at best, and, at worst, openly derisive.
|
|
Meanwhile, Jane Banks (Emily Mortimer) has somewhat followed in her early feminist mother's footsteps by becoming a labor organizer, which in Disney speak makes her a spinster.
|
|
While she hopes that he'll rescue her from becoming a spinster, he's trying to figure out how to find the right parts for another of his creations.
|
|
Mantello has directed the actresses to play their roles as though they were, respectively, a sadistic, castrating drama queen, a dour, bitter spinster, and a disgruntled majorette.
|
|
Despite a campaign by the chemical industry to discredit Ms. Carson's research and to dismiss her as a communist-sympathizing spinster, the presidential report corroborated her claims.
|
|
He reserves much of his weirdest writing for his newsletter and put some of it in his second book, the Lovecraftian Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror.
|
|
Bachelor and Spinster balls — or B&S balls, a fixture in Australia since the 1880s — aim to help people in the country's vast distances meet and mate.
|
|
It's called The Merry Spinster and other tales of everyday horror, and it's a departure, in depth of world creation, amount of proper punctuation, and probably audience.
|
|
Historically, women in China who were unmarried by the age of 30 faced the stigma of being labeled "left over" or Shengnu—the Chinese equivalent of a spinster.
|
|
Hainted also explained that the reason why the time loop was kept in place all those years is because the enchantress lives in the village as a spinster.
|
|
She noted that women tend to be picked apart based on appearance more than men and are often painted as being "scorned" or "a spinster" following a breakup.
|
|
Poet. Recluse. "Spinster." While Emily Dickinson's work is known to anyone who sat through high school English, only the most superficial details of her life are common knowledge.
|
|
But with choice comes uncertainty, and this is the subject of "Spinster", Kate Bolick's often lyrical bestselling memoir about making a life on her own, now in paperback.
|
|
Laura García Lorca joked that she felt like Doña Rosita, the spinster heroine of one of her uncle's plays, who waits years for a fiancé who never returns.
|
|
She was fiery and, at thirty, already a spinster by Egyptian standards; he was fifteen years older and divorced, still a stain on anyone in a conservative society.
|
|
"I met George when I was 35 and starting to become quite resigned to the idea that I was going to be a spinster," she joked during the speech.
|
|
He's in love with his best friend Becca (Betty Gilpin), who wants to open a spin gym for women called "Spinster," and he's agreed to be her business partner.
|
|
The 11 stories in Ortberg's new collection, The Merry Spinster, out March 13, are not the ones that you grew up with — though you'll recognize some of their elements.
|
|
Both of Ortberg's books walk the line between horror and comedy, but where Texts From Jane Eyre leaned into the comedy, The Merry Spinster leans way over into horror.
|
|
But in telling this story, Olnek also unseats another part of the Dickinson mythology, which suggests Emily was a lonely spinster who wrote her poems and shut them away.
|
|
As an only child, my bubbeleh first lived in service to her mother, and then to her husband when she married just shy of 28 years old, a spinster.
|
|
The end result was a show that had Diana (played by Ellie Wood Walker) defending the world, all while her mother complained about her being a spinster in the making.
|
|
So, were her parents being welcoming out of relief that their daughter wouldn't become a spinster or out of surprise that she, as her friends pointed out, had got lucky?
|
|
A 32-year-old society spinster in one of Massachusetts' wealthiest families, she moves resolutely through the gloomy Borden household, every creak and groan contributing to its coffin-like atmosphere.
|
|
"I didn't love him at first," she reveals in a conversation about my grandpa, the man she married at the spinster age of 2104 and was married to for 22016 years.
|
|
On one end, you have sex-crazed Anita (Molly Shannon), and on the other, virgin spinster Josie, who's idea of a wild night out is finishing yet another needle-point cushion.
|
|
But in telling the story, Olnek also unseats an established part of the Dickinson mythology, which suggests that Emily was a lonely spinster who wrote her poems and shut them away.
|
|
Harper, who is now 2503, liked to tell friends that she had "more self-improvement activities than a Victorian spinster," busying herself with hobbies including sewing, ballroom dancing, tennis and piano lessons.
|
|
Bored and careless of other people's feelings, she makes a cutting remark that is meant to be witty but ends up humiliating its target, the kindly, twittery, tedious professional spinster Miss Bates.
|
|
Our titular heroine is fed up with being single and spends basically the entire movie trying to change what seems like her spinster fate, no matter how many pairs of Spanx it takes.
|
|
Read these stories next: Why We Miss The Point When We Call Masculinity "Toxic" Bitch, Slut, Spinster & 5 Other Words Women Have Reclaimed What The Salem Witch Trials Teach Us About Believing Women
|
|
Still, its lead character Miss Price (Angela Lansbury) is a motorbike-driving spinster who can't ride a broom side-saddle but can use her bed to take people to far-off fantasy lands.
|
|
The nectar of the gods that is ice cream is about to get a hell of a lot more expensive, and we have the distinguished spinster that is vanilla to thank for it.
|
|
They all thought of her as a meek spinster to be pitied, which of course made her an ideal target for Lilith's plan to step into her place and influence the young half-witch.
|
|
Well, you can glean more "insight" about young people from your drunk spinster aunt popping it to "Bad and Boujee" at cousin Abe's bar mitzvah, but that doesn't mean it's not worth a read.
|
|
Anna and her mother are left to care for Lydia, largely on their own, laboring under the presumption that Eddie is dead, and surviving on money periodically doled out by Eddie's wayward spinster sister.
|
|
According to the librarian who posted about the controversy on Twitter, the all-women school's yearbook, called the Spinster, contained offensive photographs and cartoons throughout its 115 years of publication from 1898 to 2013.
|
|
Gertrude Treadwell, who died in 1933, is said to haunt her old house on East Fourth Street and "is very tied to her identity as a spinster and as a homeowner," Ms. Janes said.
|
|
There, with her trademark bow in her hair, she flaunted the persona she had perfected: a feisty, witty, outspoken spinster (although she was actually a widow) who refused to grow old without a fight.
|
|
" When Carson delivered what would be her final public speech, "Man Against Himself," hobbling to the stage with the use of a cane, a local newspaper described her as a "middle-aged, arthritis-crippled spinster.
|
|
Examples abound: Moira Weigel's debut, "Labor of Love"; Kate Bolick's dissection of singleness in her 2015 book, "Spinster"; Jessica Valenti's recent memoir, "Sex Object"; Kristin Dombek's starkly original take on threesomes in The Paris Review.
|
|
His death threw the Austen women on hard times and, at 29, she was also facing the fact that she would likely remain a spinster — just like Elizabeth Watson, the older sister in the novel.
|
|
Just this month, gender-critical feminists who have been banned from Twitter for extensive transphobic harassment have recently organized under the alt-right message board Gab to form "Spinster," a social media platform for TERFs.
|
|
Persuasion's Anne Elliot is 27 and unmarried, making her by Regency-era standards a spinster — and as we are told in the book's opening pages that "her bloom had vanished early," her prospects look dim.
|
|
Laura, in a sensitive portrayal by Ms Mulligan, starts the film as a smart but unhappy 31-year-old spinster who meets and quickly agrees to marry the silent, steady and conservative Henry McAllan (Jason Clarke).
|
|
Single mothers, elegant divorcées, spinster aunts, bored housewives, daughters, wilting violets … all in anxious anticipation as to whether the shoe will fit, fit them alone, that the prince from the fairy tale is meant for them.
|
|
"Either you had to be a spinster, or you could accompany your husband if he was an anthropologist," Dr. Sutton explained in 2015 in an interview with the New York Public Library's Community Oral History Project.
|
|
It is the reason Jane, the responsible eldest, succumbs to riding out in the rain, risking serious illness, to secure Mr. Bingley's affection — better she die in pursuit of him than die an impoverished spinster. Mrs.
|
|
How does the single, middle-aged woman live when she's not relegated to the role of the cautionary tale, the punchline spinster, the wacky aunt whose family suffers her visits out of equal parts love and pity?
|
|
It's an acid pop of a TV show dedicated to rescuing Emily Dickinson from her popular legacy as a lonely spinster hermit, and it's willing to use as many anachronistic needle drops as it takes to do so.
|
|
I recently spoke with Ortberg over the phone about the ethics of fairy tales, the joys of peanut butter, and why The Merry Spinster is like a dark mirror to NBC's existential ethics-centered comedy The Good Place.
|
|
"It's like, wow, we were fed a story about a spinster recluse who apparently didn't want to be published and was rocking in her chair, peeking out her window at funerals, when really it's the opposite," Shannon said.
|
|
"Well, I'm glad I'm not Miss Dinsmoor" — the name of the rich but jilted spinster living in a rundown mansion in the 1998 movie — she said, "or Miss Havisham!" the name of the same character in the book.
|
|
After losing her husband, Dr. Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) thought she'd become a spinster, but there's a new hot doctor in town who is out to date the widow – and he won't be ignored.
|
|
Surreal photos from a two-year odyssey experiencing rural Australia's Bachelor and Spinster Balls Down and out on New York City's Bowery in the 1970s SuperFan badge holders consistently post smart, timely comments about Washington area sports and teams.
|
|
"I started picturing myself sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, and words like 'old maid' and 'spinster' started to come to mind, and I realized that no, I don't want that to be my fate," Gosselin, 43, tells PEOPLE exclusively.
|
|
READ MORE: George and Amal Clooney Share a Kiss Before Gushing About Their 'Perfect' Twins The human rights lawyer, 40 also touched on his incredible generosity, and how she thought she'd be a spinster forever before they met and began dating.
|
|
"Jo should have remained a literary spinster," Alcott wrote to a friend, but she felt so pressured to satisfy expectations that "I didn't dare refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her," with an older German professor.
|
|
"I started picturing myself sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, and words like 'old maid' and 'spinster' started to come to mind, and I realized that no, I don't want that to be my fate," she told PEOPLE exclusively in April.
|
|
For decades, we've been trying to rebrand the trope of the single woman from sad lonely spinster to something more reflective of reality: an independent, discerning woman who is resistant to the pressures of the patriarchal social values we've inherited.
|
|
She proudly wears the mantle of "spinster"—"It's the spinsters who made me," she proclaims—and ushers us, sometimes dreamily, other times with searing attention, into a personal narrative about her life amid a mutually supportive "found family" and intimate friends.
|
|
" She took the book title "Paddling My Own Canoe" from another bold woman who became a role model for future generations, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote in her journal, "I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.
|
|
Kindly spinster sisters fund his matriculation in a dancing academy near a museum where he grows friendly with Dmitri, a security guard who is publicly and histrionically smitten by the icy beauty of Ana Magdalena, the mystagogue of the cultlike academy.
|
|
More on In Sight: Surreal photos from a two-year odyssey experiencing rural Australia's Bachelor and Spinster Balls These twin brothers from Buenos Aires have never lived apart since the day they were born Chernobyl broke down over 30 years ago.
|
|
"Versace calls Antonio d'Amico simply 'my companion,' and for once, the phrase connotes not some James-ian spinster being trundled around Europe by a niece or some euphemism bestowed by New York Times obituary writers but a genuine term of endearment," Lemon writes.
|
|
" In a moment of reflection, Gosselin says she "started picturing myself sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, and words like 'old maid' and 'spinster' started to come to mind, and I realized that no, I don't want that to be my fate.
|
|
"I started picturing myself sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, and words like 'old maid' and 'spinster' started to come to mind, and I realized that no, I don't want that to be my fate," she told PEOPLE exclusively of the series.
|
|
"I started picturing myself sitting in a rocking chair, knitting, and words like 'old maid' and 'spinster' started to come to mind, and I realized that no, I don't want that to be my fate," she previously told PEOPLE of the series.
|
|
We also meet one of the most memorable middle-grade characters in recent memory: the Mad Spinster, a spidery-looking weaver with indigo-hued fingers, lips "stained a purple-red wine color" and a loom that may have answers to the book's mysteries.
|
|
We often cannot depend upon on our government and our mightiest institutions to safeguard citizens, and so we need spinster mentorship, and friends who double as cancer patient caretakers, and sperm donation selectors, and boisterous demonstrations outside the gates of the White House.
|
|
The book, a postmodern confection featuring a malevolent, unreliable and spectacularly dim narrator named Rufus — who is addicted to footnotes and dedicated to slandering "the spinster authoress," as he calls Jane Austen — is very, very funny, and stands on its own merits.
|
|
If I had wanted to talk about the single life in a grand, public way, I might have written something like Rebecca Traister's "All the Single Ladies" or Kate Bolick's "Spinster," which look at the lives and contributions of single women in America.
|
|
And there's like a wink in there about marriage and what happened to women in that day and age if they didn't get married and how they were considered a spinster and whether or not they could actually make a living for themselves.
|
|
But when a puppyish student named Walter (Benoît Magimel) makes a move on her, he finds she isn't a tightly wound spinster dreaming of being swept her off her feet, but a masochist whose longings fall within the realms of both kink and paraphilia.
|
|
Some have carped that for a book about life on her own, Ms Bolick seems to suffer no shortage of boyfriends (her publisher, keen to make clear that she is a "spinster" by choice, put a picture of the beautiful author on the cover).
|
|
What we get instead, really, is Hitler's food story (including a stretch of nine pages with no mention of Braun), which isn't particularly scintillating, all things considered, and feels incongruous in the company of Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Wordsworth, the devoted spinster sister of William.
|
|
You can find support for any of these theories, and many others, in the poems; their quirks, though evened out by her early editors, nevertheless lend credence to the idea that she was a familiar New England stereotype, the flighty, eccentric, proto-spinster daughter.
|
|
I spoke to Ortberg about the The Merry Spinster, partly because their book got me more excited than any fairy tale remix since Angela Carter has, and partly because I have been a fan of theirs for years and jumped on any opportunity to speak to them.
|
|
" His neighbors nickname him Unlucky and have no interest in marrying his probably cursed daughter; she, in turn, blames her father for her spinster status and takes great pride in the "Asante soldiers' valiant battles against the British, their strength, their hope for a free kingdom.
|
|
So when the #selflove movement (a practice of showing appreciation for yourself through physical and psychological actions) started gaining mainstream momentum, it appeared to be just another eye-rolling thing us spinster gals were supposed to embrace to show how fine we are with our unattached status.
|
|
Years later, Anne is a spinster who's never really recovered from her heartbreak at losing Wentworth — and then he turns up in the neighborhood once more, now a rich, successful military captain with his eye on a completely different girl, even though he still loves Anne.
|
|
What they missed was an excellent Kenneth Lonergan screenplay, crisply paced Hettie MacDonald direction, and a cast — led by Hayley Atwell as the strong-willed spinster Margaret Schlegel and Matthew Macfadyen as the conservative widower Henry Wilcox — which found some of the deeper character notes in Forster's story.
|
|
As Hopper contemplates the circumstances of her spinster life—among them fraught cohabitation, seeking out a sperm donor (see the incisive and metaphorically hilarious essay "Moby-Dick"), and assembling a care team for a friend with stage four cancer—she foregrounds a claim that ought to be obvious.
|
|
Women don't have to get married at 21 or be considered a spinster, and there are divorce laws in place so that women can break up with people, which wasn't an option for people like poor Effie Gray who was stuck in a terrible marriage with John Rifkin.
|
|
Ryder plays Philip's Aunt Evelyn as a not particularly bright spinster desperate for social validation; Turturro plays her love interest, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, an emigré from South Carolina with a scene-chewing accent to match, who ends up serving as the Jewish community's chief collaborator with the Lindbergh administration.
|
|
I wasn't allowed to say at dinner that I had a girlfriend or, even worse, to invite her for Christmas, but I finally told my mom I didn't want to be referred to in the family as the old spinster with her cat who hadn't been lucky enough to find a man.
|
|
But then it evolved from the 'wild girl tamed by love', popular in the '80s, to the 'quirky alternagirl tamed by love' in the '90s to the 'klutzy, hapless girl-child rescued by love' in the 2000s, which also evolved to the 'desperate almost-spinster taken off the shelf at the last minute'.
|
|
Corporal John McBurney (Eastwood), brought to matron Martha Farnsworth's all-girl boarding school to recover from a leg wound, initially thinks he's in some kind of bawdy wartime romp, spending recuperation time seducing teacher and pupil alike: from mature spinster Miss Martha (Geraldine Page) to 12-year-old student Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin).
|
|
In a phone interview, Peretti, who will appear later this year in the films "Friendsgiving," as a hippie-ish member of a Thanksgiving-guest hodgepodge, and "Spinster," as a woman confronting singledom on her 39th birthday, spoke about her poignant farewell, her next big thing and her mission to make comedies funny again.
|
|
Jeff Sessions's lawsuit against California's "sanctuary" laws, explained Why Women's March leaders are being accused of anti-Semitism Mallory Ortberg talks The Toast, The Merry Spinster, and the joys of peanut butter The latest White House resignation has spooked Wall Street 2 winners and 2 losers from the 2018 Texas primary elections
|
|
More on In Sight: Surreal photos from a two-year odyssey experiencing rural Australia's Bachelor and Spinster Balls Mining for gold in the world's highest permanent human settlement Heartbreaking photos of greyhounds caught in an age-old Spanish hunting tradition SuperFan badge holders consistently post smart, timely comments about Washington area sports and teams.
|
|
In 1869, Gould, the archetype of the Wall Street buccaneer, engineered a famous "corner" (that is, a near monopoly) in gold—with Gould actually having a crony marry Grant's poor spinster sister-in-law, according to his partner, hoping that the family connection would make the President pressure the Treasury not to sell gold and lower its price.
|
|
Nonfiction authors have approached this challenge by overcompensating, promoting cheery self-actualization through hollow personal brands that treat optimism as an end rather than a means—we are constantly being told to Lean In, to embrace being a Spinster or among All the Single Ladies, and if all else fails, to come up with Hope in the Dark.
|
|
Gerwig mischievously works in quotes attributed to Alcott rather than her characters (including a favorite of mine, about her thoughts on marriage: "I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe") and uses her screenplay to illustrate just how "Little Women" ended up with a puzzlingly cheesy romantic ending for its cheese-shunning protagonist, Jo March.
|
|
More on In Sight: Surreal photos from a two-year odyssey experiencing rural Australia's Bachelor and Spinster Balls Mining for gold in the world's highest permanent human settlement These twin brothers from Buenos Aires have never lived apart since the day they were born SuperFan badge holders consistently post smart, timely comments about Washington area sports and teams.
|
|
A number of recent books have taken up her argument, looking anew at marriage and how it benefits women (or mostly doesn't), as well as how our ideas about courtship and intimacy have evolved: "All the Single Ladies" by Rebecca Traister, "Labor of Love" by Moira Weigel, "Spinster" by Kate Bolick and "Future Sex" by Emily Witt, to name just a few.
|
|
In Gerwig's version, which opened on Christmas Day, it is also the story of Alcott, perhaps the real heroine of the Marches, who never married ("I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe," she said), built a fortune on the "Little Women" books, and on whose life and letters Gerwig said she relied upon as a guide.
|
|
Yet more than one hundred years after she painted the first ever full-length nude self-portrait by a professional woman artist, she continues too often to be described as an eccentric spinster, so disheartened by not selling her work at an early exhibition that she stopped exhibiting publicly and only showed her work to friends at her private salon.
|
|
Celebrated British actress/comedian Tracey Ullman returns for a third season of her three-time Emmy®-nominated HBO sketch-comedy series, reprising her takes on beloved real and fictional characters from seasons' past, including a devilish Dame Judi Dench; long-suffering German Chancellor Angela Merkel; spunky Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; newly-minted stepmother Jerry Hall; ever-optimistic spinster Kay Clark; and many more.
|
|
I'd read in one of my acting books to dress as the character you're auditioning for, so I ran around my house pulling out clothing that was the opposite of my usual wardrobe to create an English spinster outfit: an A-shape, mid-calf, tweed skirt; plain, long-sleeve blouse buttoning to the neck; horn-rimmed glasses; flat shoes with laces; hairpins to flatten my hair; and no makeup.
|
|
Many of his human companions were equally unusual: John Breed's son, a day laborer, who lamented the destruction of his boyhood home; Perez Blood, the eccentric astronomer who Thoreau visited repeatedly on the outskirts of town; Sophia Foord, the brilliant spinster who fell in love with the one man, Thoreau, who rivaled her in peculiarity; the unnamed fugitive slave whom Thoreau escorted to the railroad station so that he could make safe passage to Canada.
|
|
In some ways, The Best of Everything is a relic: the dialogue with its cadence of melodrama (how many times can a woman say "I love you" in a row?), the idea that you could be a spinster by age 25, that the girls portrayed in it (women in their twenties were always "girls" back then) are all undoubtedly straight and white and cisgender and middle class — broke, of course, but not so broke that they don't have safety nets.
|
|
The Merry Spinster pulls from Ortberg's creepiest recurring Toast column, "Children's Stories Made Horrific," which is just what it sounds like but simultaneously funnier and creepier than you'd expect: Fairy tales and beloved children's classics become tales of emotional vampirism, with the Wind in the Willows characters teaming up to inflict a violent intervention on Mr. Toad, or the sister from "The Six Swans" devoting her life to making it up to her mother that she was born a girl.
|
|
Looser traces Austen's legacy: the Aunt Jane who emerged in the years just after her death; the nice old spinster aunt who happened to write a good yarn; the conservative Divine Jane of literary gentleman's clubs, who gloried in exalting traditional gender roles and a traditional idea of England; the demure rebel icon of the suffragettes, who definitively demonstrated that women were capable of genius and who tore apart gender roles with her pen; the romantic of the sexy Darcy era, who wrote love stories.
|
|
He has written about income distribution in the early Roman Empire (inequality during the Augustan age was roughly comparable to that of the United States today), the effects on European soccer when limits on the number of foreign players allowed in club teams were lifted (the richest clubs became even more dominant in their leagues), and the financial implications of Elizabeth Bennet's decisions in "Pride and Prejudice" (marrying Mr. Darcy would put her in the top tenth of one per cent, while, as a spinster, she would have fallen from the top percentile to about the fiftieth percentile).
|
|