Word: spinsterism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Miss Reardon Drinks a Little, has accomplished what another quasi-literary rising playwright. Tom Stoppard, failed to. He has emerged from his The Effect of Gamma Ray on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds success off-Broadway last season with a phenomenally entertaining tragi-comedy about two sisters, both spinster school teachers, at war with themselves and with their hard-boiled, married and successful sister Ceil. The combination at work in this production of superb acting, smooth, carefully thought-out direction, and clever, deftly turned dialogue makes the finished product well nigh irresistible. Estelle Parsons as Catherine Reardon shows the same...
Muriel Spark's tenth novel is a portrait of insanity nearly as stark as madness itself. The heroine is Lise, a 34-year-old spinster who has worked in the same office in a North European city for 16 years. Having bought herself an ugly traveling outfit, she sets out for an unnamed southland ostensibly for a vacation, but really to find someone willing to kill...
...sensitive young narrator who will live to be a writer; the narrator's friend, an athlete who falls to his death from the town's water tower; a rich widow who befriends the narrator and sends him to college; the town banker, the town's batty spinster librarian, the secret homosexual. So many novelists seem to have lived the same boyhood...
...dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum, parents-and-children will be only one of many "families": couples, age groups, working groups, mixed communes, blood-related clans, class groups, creative groups. Single women will have the right to stay single without ridicule, without the attitudes now betrayed by "spinster" and "bachelor." Lesbians or homosexuals will no longer be denied legally binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance rights. Paradoxically, the number of homosexuals may get smaller. With fewer overpossessive mothers and fewer fathers who hold up an impossibly cruel or perfectionist idea of manhood, boys will...
...cities are full of lonely people who rely on dogs as substitute friends, spouses and children. Many a furnished room contains a small human and a huge Great Dane or similar beast. Some homosexuals use exotic breeds as props for pickups. In Manhattan's Riverside Park, one eccentric spinster used to talk incessantly to her aged dachshund while wheeling it about in a baby carriage. An indignant father once tried to embarrass her by having his toddler wear a dog muzzle, to no avail...