Word: spinster
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...Fine Arts could illustrate many of these theses from its superb collection of some 2,000 costumes, one of the finest in the world. It was assembled during the past 80-odd years by a number of donors, but the best of the clothes were given by a dedicated spinster, the late Elizabeth Day McCormick of Chicago (granddaughter of Reaper Tycoon Cyrus McCormick), who ranged Europe and the U.S., skimping on taxis and her own clothes, to buy a total of some 20,000 costumes, pieces of embroidery, books and prints, all of which she left to the museum...
Novelist-Screenwriter Peter Viertel, who was once Ava's constant companion in Paris and Mexico during the filming of The Sun Also Rises some years ago, is also in Puerto Vallarta, since he is now the husband of Deborah Kerr, who is playing a Nantucket spinster in the film. Viertel is understandably wary of Ava, but he is also a little skittish with Director John Huston. He worked on the screenplay of Huston's African Queen and followed up with a novel called White Hunter, Black Heart, which was a thinly disguised, malicious portrait of Huston...
...along the path of natural human feeling only to jar him with some small monstrosity at the end. In Our Lady of the Flowers, for example, Divine's despair is so eloquently described that the reader is moved to the kind of sympathy one feels for an aging spinster who is losing her looks. Then, with a sneer, Genet reminds everyone again that Divine is a homosexual after all. Naturally, Genet is delighted with such jokes, which maneuver the reader almost into Genet's own shoes. What criminal would not rejoice in the knowledge that...
...Spinster, her vivid novel pub lished in 1959, Sylvia Ashton-Warner told of a loving, slightly balmy school teacher who taught Maori children in back-country New Zealand. Herself a teacher for 17 years in Maori schools (but a grandmother rather than a spinster), Novelist Ashton-Warner endowed her heroine with an extraordinary gift for handling young Maori minds in conflict with civilization. Dropping the fictional cloak, she has now expounded her singular methods in Teacher. Published this week (Simon & Schuster; $5), it may well be the year's best book on education...
...fateful antinomy of power and love. Her leading lady (Geraldine Page) is a gabby genteel old maid, one of those wispy little women who flutter through the literature of the South like a flock of steel butterflies. She lives in a rotting ancestral manse, she graciously permits her spinster sister (Wendy Hiller) to wait on her hand and foot, she justifies her gistless existence by smother-mothering her younger brother (Dean Martin). The brother is a frivolous failure and she likes him that way. He makes her feel necessary, he makes her feel important; and in pursuing his problems...