Word: spinster
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Amid so much activity, the stereotypes no longer fit. Through the 1970s, the archetypal gardener was over 50 and had time and money to spare: a smug matron with impeccable calceolarias, an eccentric rosarian, a spinster growing herbs. But now, says the National Gardening Association, 78% of America's households garden, and all the recent surveys suggest that the most fervent converts are between 30 and 49 and still evenly divided between men and women. Those who once bought geraniums and parched them in college dorm rooms have discovered that they can even garden competitively...
...novels include Hotel du Lac, the 1984 winner of Britain's top fiction award, the Booker Prize. Yet despite her finished style and genteel settings, she is as hard-boiled as any writer of detective fiction. Many of Brookner's principals are updatings of that familiar character, the English spinster as connoisseur of other people's behavior. Rachel is not only unattached but detached, a state that suits her analytical intelligence and chilly rectitude...
...Paris, seeking refuge in a remote village in Jutland on Denmark's northern coast. If there is something unusual in her bearing, its source -- an extraordinary talent -- is not hinted at. For 14 years she toils unpaid, uncomplaining, almost unspeaking, as cook and servant for the spinster sisters Martina (Birgitte Federspiel) and Philippa (Bodil Kjer), who give her shelter...
...awakens: "Something unpleasant had happened. And then she remembered. It was the war." It characterizes a Hungarian discussing the liability of touring Budapest with a husband: "You do not see the moon and the river. You are thinking only of what you shall eat." The dryly insightful spinster, an honorable role since the days of Jane Austen, is no longer in vogue; Pym was the last of the line. This and her 13 previous and richer books show how much the type is to be missed...
Judith Hearne took up permanent residence in the literary world's case load in 1955 when Novelist Brian Moore anatomized her "lonely passion." In Peter Nelson's screenplay, however, she is more a curio than a figure of powerful emotional relevance. This classic spinster (to whose portrayal Maggie Smith brings all the right moves but nothing very individual) is a Dublin piano teacher. Naturally she drinks a bit. Sometimes she drinks a lot. Her timorous gentility suggests to her landlady's brother (Bob Hoskins, with some of his spark plugs missing) the possibilities of untapped wealth -- enough of it, anyway...