Word: spinster
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...door sales, occasional stints of domestic service and eventually writing. Along the way, she seems to have developed a sense of what loneliness and isolation can do, even to the most simple, hardworking folk. Such people, earnest and a little unhinged, began popping up in her fiction: a spinster trying to manage a remote farm, a young female helper and a bizarre secret concealed on the premises (The Well); an old man dreaming up plans to disrupt the nursing home into which he has been dumped (Mr. Scobie's Riddle...
...Monica has seen all she wants to. To think that he was available all along! A spinster who lives comfortably in Paris, she has been half in love with Simon since the days when the three girls shared a flat in London and he came around to court pretty Richeldis with her "kind, insensitive eyes." It requires very little effort -- a nice French lunch with a glass of Beaumes de Venise at dessert -- to acquire Simon and launch a trite, messy affair...
After a year's absence, Julian (Dan Rapport) and his new wife Lily (Ellen Bledsoe) pay an unexpected visit to Julian's spinster sisters Anna (Nora Jaskowiak) and Carrie (Sara Melson). Julian, who has become suddenly and mysteriously rich, showers his wife and sisters with gifts, but the women are unhappy because Julian's newfound independence upsets the balance of his relationships with each of them. Lily's anxiety is compounded by the presence of her estranged mother Albertine (Katherina Urso) and her mother's lover, Henry (Lisa Garmire...
...stars are not to blame, though they are all about ten years older than their characters in the play. Diane Keaton is Lenny, the spinster with the shriveled ovary and a motherly protectiveness toward her younger sisters that too often expresses itself in shrill hectoring. Jessica Lange is Meg, the singer, free spirit and hot number, who has come home to suture the family wounds and relive an affair with her old beau Doc Porter (nicely played by Lange's real beau Sam Shepard). Sissy Spacek is Babe, under arrest for the attempted murder of her husband, who had discovered...
Finally, for the pressured reader in search of humor, A Summons to Memphis provides it. The comedy is situational, two spinster sisters preventing their octagenerian father from remarrying; descriptive, this same eccentric duo frequenting nightclubs, dressed in sequined, clingy, front-and-back plunging fashions; and double-edged, undercut by a gently cynical realism. The comic sensibility is particular to Taylor's novel, but the truths revealed are universal...