Word: spinsterism
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Thanksgiving Visitor, set in backwoods Alabama, elaborates on Capote's glowing relationship with his only boyhood friend, an old spinster cousin named Miss Sook. She had no education and had never traveled beyond the county borders. She was "a poet of a kind but deeply suppressed. She might have been an Emily Dickinson in another culture." In the simple TV tale, she coddles young "Buddy" (as Capote is called) and tries to shield him from his dour and insensitive relatives in the parentless household. The casting, supervised by the author, is impeccable. Geraldine Page, who won an Emmy award...
Died. Greet Hofmans, 74, Dutch faith healer whose influence on The Netherlands' royal household made headlines around the world in 1956; of unknown causes; in Amsterdam. In 1949 the gaunt, gravel-voiced spinster, who claimed that God had invested her with supernatural powers, was summoned by Prince Bernhard to work her miracles on the young and partially blind Princess Maria Christina. The ministrations failed, and in 1950 Prince Bernhard ordered the faith healer from the palace-though Queen Juliana continued to consult her and allowed her to have meetings on Queen Mother Wilhelmina's estate. Rumor held Miss...
...Ruth Buzzi, 28, from Wequetequock, Conn., plays Gladys, the man-hungry frump in the hairnet and ratty sweater-a character she developed when playing the spinster secretary in a summer-stock production of Auntie Mame. A graduate of 20 cabaret revues, she excels at song-and-dance numbers but is guaranteed to break it up when, as Gladys, she confides: "I never go out with soccer players. I hear they're not allowed to use their
...Grove's fictional counterpart, and they are, for the most part, splendidly solid. His latest, alas, is not. The Aristocrat is slender and seemingly self-indulgent. It would be slick as well, were it not for Richter's imperturbable sincerity. He presents a caricature of an indomitable spinster straight from Southern romance as if she were a discovery, and his very...
...spinster has always been a haunting and rather mysterious figure: no man quite knows her. Victorian writers characterized her as a religious zealot or an anxious nanny. In the post-analytical theater, Playwrights William Inge and Tennessee Williams toss her about like a sex bomb on a short fuse -guaranteed to explode somewhere in the second act. Sylvia Ashton-Warner's Spinster and Margaret Laurence's A Jest of God show the bomb defused. Both novels capture the faded maiden in dignity and pathos. She is as obsolete as an antimacassar-and as real as the reader...