The word bachelor was never exiled, never lost its evocation of liberty, autonomy and opportunity, but that word, her word, fossilised out on the horizon beside the snake-haired goddess, and names such as feminazi, marriage-wrecker, and mad fucking witch attached themselves to women who remained uncoupled past a certain age—an increasingly indeterminate age, an age previously around twenty-eight, which, by the mid-1980s, was around forty, and these days is the time a woman’s biological clock tocks loudest, usually around thirty-three.
