Word: spinster
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...valiantly swigging a blend of gin, vodka and Fresca. In a duel of social proprieties, a daughter defies her mother's edict that she attend a dance that will enhance her status in the Junior League and opts to attend a performance of Saint Joan with her spinster aunt. Still later, as an Amherst student photographs his aunt's chinaware in the room, he tells her that he is doing an anthropology paper on "the eating habits of vanishing cultures" and that her crystal finger bowls symbolize "a neurotic obsession with cleanliness associated with the guilt...
Those who have read any of Warner's eight volumes of short stories or six volumes of poetry or seven novels will not be deceived by her prim persona. In her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she wrote with quiet fierceness of a "genteel spinster" who chooses "to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others," even if the price be a compact with the devil...
This is a tale of three sisters. One is a spinster, one is a sexpot, and one is a screwball. The tangled web of relationships they weave possesses sprightly humor, zany logic, folksy warmth and a tincture of poignancy. The author's first full-length play and a Pulitzer prizewinner, Crimes of the Heart is a kind of in-depth soap opera that reveals character even as it unravels situations...
...Place in the Sun, Roman Holiday, Sabrina, The Facts of Life and The Sting); in Los Angeles. Her first job for a studio was draping garlands over elephants in a Cecil B. De-Mille circus film. She notched her first Oscar for dressing Olivia de Havilland as a spinster in The Heiress in 1949. Prim and priggish-looking in her bangs and tortoise-shell glasses, Head costumed actors for more than 1,000 movies and created some fashion trends, including a minor 1930s craze after she wrapped Dorothy Lamour in a sarong for Jungle Princess...
Stevie Smith was an English poet who dwelt almost all her 69 spinster years (1902-71) in a grubby suburb of London...