Amy Gentry's Blog - Posts Tagged "spinster-lit"
Hot Spinster Summer
This is my first blog post, so hello!
If you don't already know me, I'm Amy Gentry, and I'm a novelist, reviewer, and ex-academic. My first three published novels are all novels of suspense (Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits), and my current work-in-progress is a slight pivot to horror. But honestly, I don't subscribe to strict genre divisions--they're helpful for readers, but can sometimes obscure what an author's really trying to do. Which, in my case, is to write whatever the hell I want! I also read whatever the hell I want, and that's mostly what this blog will be about.
Current Reads Corner (aka Hot Spinster Summer):
I just discovered Anita Brookner's novels, and I'm kicking myself for not reading her before. She died in 2016 and published a whopping 26 books in her lifetime--mostly fiction, though she was an art historian as well and published several academic works. She published her first novel at 53 (!!!!) and thereafter wrote ONE NOVEL A YEAR UNTIL SHE DIED (!!!!!!!). She won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac.
So, while this is all a leeeetle bit intimidating for an author, it's nothing but glorious good news for a reader--especially a Henry-James-worshipping, Jane-Austen-fetishizing, Muriel-Spark-and-Barbara-Pym-fangirling lady like me. In other words, Anita Brookner is PEAK Spinster Lit. She excelled at acutely internal portraits of intensely guarded women who were too smart to fall for the traditional wifey role, but too cynical and self-protective to enjoy the romanticism of the '60s-'70s. One reason I love her is that her spinster heroines are not prudish about sex--they typically have lots of it, but only with married or otherwise unavailable men, as if to inoculate themselves from emotional disaster (which always comes anyway). In books like A Friend from England and The Rules of Engagement, her protagonists measure themselves against female friends who seem to have figured out how to somehow get the best of both worlds--libertinism AND the benefits of protection and companionship associated with traditional marriage--while they themselves seem to get neither.
Sometimes these portraits can feel dated, but honestly, they mostly don't. So many of the feelings she describes--the freedom and loneliness and subtle shame of singleness, coupled with the overwhelming feeling that within a patriarchy you're kind of fucked either way--made me wince in recognition. Brookner, though writing almost exclusively about white, straight, middle-class-ish women, is unusually clear-eyed about the unspoken role of privilege and wealth in love--the way a stable family background or heaps of money can buy a single woman self-respect and comfort, or a married woman autonomy and clout within her relationship.
Brookner herself rejected many marriage proposals, sensing they came from "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts." She called herself "the loneliest woman in London," and yet, reading her books, you can't help but feel that her spinster heroines are making the best choices available to them in the moment. But she's not sentimental about them, either. She's like a Jane Austen who unflinchingly turns the scalpel on herself--and, by implication, the reader.
There was a "modern literary authors rewrite Jane Austen novels" project a while back--I'm not sure if it's still happening--but I wish she'd gotten to take a crack at Persuasion before she died. I would have liked to see that.
tl;dr: If you, like me, are a sucker for a paper cut to the soul with a little squeeze of lemon, I'd recommend starting with Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac.
If you don't already know me, I'm Amy Gentry, and I'm a novelist, reviewer, and ex-academic. My first three published novels are all novels of suspense (Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, and Bad Habits), and my current work-in-progress is a slight pivot to horror. But honestly, I don't subscribe to strict genre divisions--they're helpful for readers, but can sometimes obscure what an author's really trying to do. Which, in my case, is to write whatever the hell I want! I also read whatever the hell I want, and that's mostly what this blog will be about.
Current Reads Corner (aka Hot Spinster Summer):
I just discovered Anita Brookner's novels, and I'm kicking myself for not reading her before. She died in 2016 and published a whopping 26 books in her lifetime--mostly fiction, though she was an art historian as well and published several academic works. She published her first novel at 53 (!!!!) and thereafter wrote ONE NOVEL A YEAR UNTIL SHE DIED (!!!!!!!). She won the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac.
So, while this is all a leeeetle bit intimidating for an author, it's nothing but glorious good news for a reader--especially a Henry-James-worshipping, Jane-Austen-fetishizing, Muriel-Spark-and-Barbara-Pym-fangirling lady like me. In other words, Anita Brookner is PEAK Spinster Lit. She excelled at acutely internal portraits of intensely guarded women who were too smart to fall for the traditional wifey role, but too cynical and self-protective to enjoy the romanticism of the '60s-'70s. One reason I love her is that her spinster heroines are not prudish about sex--they typically have lots of it, but only with married or otherwise unavailable men, as if to inoculate themselves from emotional disaster (which always comes anyway). In books like A Friend from England and The Rules of Engagement, her protagonists measure themselves against female friends who seem to have figured out how to somehow get the best of both worlds--libertinism AND the benefits of protection and companionship associated with traditional marriage--while they themselves seem to get neither.
Sometimes these portraits can feel dated, but honestly, they mostly don't. So many of the feelings she describes--the freedom and loneliness and subtle shame of singleness, coupled with the overwhelming feeling that within a patriarchy you're kind of fucked either way--made me wince in recognition. Brookner, though writing almost exclusively about white, straight, middle-class-ish women, is unusually clear-eyed about the unspoken role of privilege and wealth in love--the way a stable family background or heaps of money can buy a single woman self-respect and comfort, or a married woman autonomy and clout within her relationship.
Brookner herself rejected many marriage proposals, sensing they came from "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts." She called herself "the loneliest woman in London," and yet, reading her books, you can't help but feel that her spinster heroines are making the best choices available to them in the moment. But she's not sentimental about them, either. She's like a Jane Austen who unflinchingly turns the scalpel on herself--and, by implication, the reader.
There was a "modern literary authors rewrite Jane Austen novels" project a while back--I'm not sure if it's still happening--but I wish she'd gotten to take a crack at Persuasion before she died. I would have liked to see that.
tl;dr: If you, like me, are a sucker for a paper cut to the soul with a little squeeze of lemon, I'd recommend starting with Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac.
I Found the Anti-Anita Brookner and She's Great
During the pandemic, I noticed a new question popping up during author interviews and Zoom panels: "What are your favorite comfort reads?"
I always dread this question. I read horror novels for comfort. When stressed, I need the stakes in a novel to be higher than those of real life. I find it cozy.
My two favorite genres are lady horror and spinster lit. They overlap more than you would think. Three million British men were killed, wounded, or lost in World War I; that left a lot of single women to tough out years of economic hardship alone. I'd argue that spinster lit is itself a kind of war literature. (See Molly Keane's Good Behaviour.)
Lately, my favorite spinster lit author has been Anita Brookner, who goes further than the prior generation (and anticipates the Sad Millennial Sex genre) by suggesting that freedom and money and plentiful menfolk aren't actually enough to liberate the lonely woman. I could drink a case of this, and for the past month, I've been working my way through her oeuvre, drawing inspiration from her crushingly grim Jamesian plots and almost psychedelically interiorized prose.
But, having recently exhausted the Brookner supply at my library, I found myself feeling--well--exhausted. I don't mean to say that I fell asleep multiple times while reading Strangers, although obviously I did. (I have a great armchair and no objection to an afternoon nap.) I mean that after a while, watching a lonely person get pushed around by relatives, friends, and random acquaintances for two hundred pages--after which she briefly conceives of an exit plan, then gives up, sliding back into the tepid bath of the familiar--it all begins to make you feel a bit trapped.
After all, where are all my adventures lately? In books. And if those books are all about people whose adventures are also in books--books that are, themselves, full of unrealized dreams!--then it's spinsters all the way down, folks.
So, imagine my surprise when I sat down to devour what I supposed would be another grim, lonely classic (albeit with a cheerfully embossed floral cover) and found, instead, a thrilling treatise on liberation. The spinster in Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father wins her freedom on page one, not page 300. The book is all about where it will take her, and who it will make her, and how she'll become the kind of person who can defend it--and defend others from similar tyrannies.
When plump, plain, 33-year-old Jennifer Dodge's monstrous father unexpectedly takes a second wife, freeing her of the promise she made on her mother's deathbed to take care of him forever, she doesn't waste a millisecond wondering what to do with her freedom. On her first day in the wild, she takes a train, walks 20 miles, rents a cottage, stays up all night talking to an eligible bachelor on a mattress she's dragged under an apple tree, and sleeps under the stars. Until the halfway mark, it's just nonstop eating, gardening, looking at birds, and marveling that life can be so freaking pleasant.
Of course, there are obstacles in the second half; there's that looming shadow of a bully, as well as the more lighthearted struggles of Jennifer's new friend, a hapless clergyman, to get away from his domineering sister. But, except for a few tense pages here and there, we always know that things are going to work out, just as we know that, come what may, a Jane Austen novel will end in marriage.
In fact, only one macabre detail prevents Von Arnim (who also wrote the much-beloved book The Enchanted April ) from being something of a twentieth-century Austen. The happy ending of this blithe fantasy isn't a marriage. It's a <spoiler>death</spoiler>. In other words, it's the perfect comfort read.
tl;dr: For a comfort read that doesn't involve gore, or even mild disappointment, try Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father.
I always dread this question. I read horror novels for comfort. When stressed, I need the stakes in a novel to be higher than those of real life. I find it cozy.
My two favorite genres are lady horror and spinster lit. They overlap more than you would think. Three million British men were killed, wounded, or lost in World War I; that left a lot of single women to tough out years of economic hardship alone. I'd argue that spinster lit is itself a kind of war literature. (See Molly Keane's Good Behaviour.)
Lately, my favorite spinster lit author has been Anita Brookner, who goes further than the prior generation (and anticipates the Sad Millennial Sex genre) by suggesting that freedom and money and plentiful menfolk aren't actually enough to liberate the lonely woman. I could drink a case of this, and for the past month, I've been working my way through her oeuvre, drawing inspiration from her crushingly grim Jamesian plots and almost psychedelically interiorized prose.
But, having recently exhausted the Brookner supply at my library, I found myself feeling--well--exhausted. I don't mean to say that I fell asleep multiple times while reading Strangers, although obviously I did. (I have a great armchair and no objection to an afternoon nap.) I mean that after a while, watching a lonely person get pushed around by relatives, friends, and random acquaintances for two hundred pages--after which she briefly conceives of an exit plan, then gives up, sliding back into the tepid bath of the familiar--it all begins to make you feel a bit trapped.
After all, where are all my adventures lately? In books. And if those books are all about people whose adventures are also in books--books that are, themselves, full of unrealized dreams!--then it's spinsters all the way down, folks.
So, imagine my surprise when I sat down to devour what I supposed would be another grim, lonely classic (albeit with a cheerfully embossed floral cover) and found, instead, a thrilling treatise on liberation. The spinster in Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father wins her freedom on page one, not page 300. The book is all about where it will take her, and who it will make her, and how she'll become the kind of person who can defend it--and defend others from similar tyrannies.
When plump, plain, 33-year-old Jennifer Dodge's monstrous father unexpectedly takes a second wife, freeing her of the promise she made on her mother's deathbed to take care of him forever, she doesn't waste a millisecond wondering what to do with her freedom. On her first day in the wild, she takes a train, walks 20 miles, rents a cottage, stays up all night talking to an eligible bachelor on a mattress she's dragged under an apple tree, and sleeps under the stars. Until the halfway mark, it's just nonstop eating, gardening, looking at birds, and marveling that life can be so freaking pleasant.
Of course, there are obstacles in the second half; there's that looming shadow of a bully, as well as the more lighthearted struggles of Jennifer's new friend, a hapless clergyman, to get away from his domineering sister. But, except for a few tense pages here and there, we always know that things are going to work out, just as we know that, come what may, a Jane Austen novel will end in marriage.
In fact, only one macabre detail prevents Von Arnim (who also wrote the much-beloved book The Enchanted April ) from being something of a twentieth-century Austen. The happy ending of this blithe fantasy isn't a marriage. It's a <spoiler>death</spoiler>. In other words, it's the perfect comfort read.
tl;dr: For a comfort read that doesn't involve gore, or even mild disappointment, try Elizabeth Von Arnim's Father.
