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Spinster
Spinster
Making a Life of One's Own
by Kate Bolick
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
"Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman's existence."
So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried.
This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.
Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.
From the Hardcover edition.
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
"Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman's existence."
So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she—along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing—remains unmarried.
This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless—the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.
Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives—a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews-
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Kate Bolick considers the question of two competing forces facing contemporary women today: societal pressure to get married and the desire to remain an independent single woman. Bolick takes on an academic tone while narrating her work with precise diction and pronunciation befitting her literary approach to her topic. Bolick explores the possibility of living an unconventional life through a selection of five literary women in recent history who, in her estimation, espouse the "spinster" lifestyle to which she aspires, and whom she designates as her "awakeners." The result is an academic and historical approach to the author's contemporary experiences as both a coupled and an uncoupled woman. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
- Janet Malcolm, author of The Journalist and the Murderer "Kate Bolick brings a bracing feminist consciousness to bear on the lives of five unconventional women of the past and on her own young life in the twenty-first century. She writes about the dilemmas of love and work--then and now--with rare perspicacity and poignancy."
- Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch "In Spinster, her wise and subtle memoir, Kate Bolick explores that freighted term--and the often-maligned woman to whom it is attached--and deftly, persuasively reclaims it. In telling the stories of her literary 'awakeners'--five vividly-conjured women who escaped the conventional ties of marriage and family--and in elegantly weaving cultural history into her own personal progress to maturity, Bolick shows by argument and example that the single life is not a predicament to be escaped, but a distinctive, demanding, rewarding form of freedom. I wish I could give this book to my thirty-year-old self; she would have taken heart and inspiration from Bolick's bold and intelligent self-examination--not necessarily to follow her path, but to be tenderly reminded of this simple but easily neglected truth: that there is another way to want to be."
- Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed "What happens when you don't get married? Setting out to answer this question, Kate Bolick has written a moving, insightful, and important inquiry into how women's lives are narrated--not just in poems, novels, biographies, and memoirs, but also in our own heads, every day, as we make the constant stream of decisions that constitute a human life. Ambitious in the best way, Spinster made me think differently about everything from novelistic plot to the meaning of furniture."
- Kirkus Reviews [starred] "Refreshingly bold and incisive... As Bolick traces her evolution into a woman unapologetic for her choices and unafraid of her own personal freedom, she also reclaims the derogatory word 'spinster' for all females, married or not... A sexy, eloquent, well-written study/memoir."
