Word: spinsterism
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...SPINSTER (242 pp.)-Sylvia Ashton-Warner-Simon & Schuster...
This first novel by a woman in her forties is an astonishing work, one of the few rewarding books of a so-so season. The spinster of the title is Anna Vorontosov, a schoolteacher in back-country New Zealand. She is a small woman of uncertain age, whose passions are still young because she has never used them. Gifted but a little balmy, Anna primes herself for school each morning with half a tumbler of brandy, frequently gets the weeps, talks persuasively to trees and flowers, has stupendous headaches in Technicolor. Wildly alive, Anna flinches only at the thought...
...Ashton-Warner, a teacher for 17 years in Maori schools and an amateur painter and musician, has fashioned a strikingly individual style: her sentences come tumbling forth like precision acrobats, alive with imagery, sensuous perception, heroic echoes. The full-lunged children are so noisily present that, for many, reading Spinster will seem like living next door to an all-day playground. The adults are drawn as well, with acute observation of the irritable crankiness that so often accompanies dedication, and with a tragicomic sense that it is often the most trivial despair that most startlingly changes an existence...
...conscience after he is told that one of his four closest friends and associates is a secret enemy of the state and must be ferreted out. Comrade Nemeth must choose between 1) his best friend. 2) his fiancee-mistress. 3) a religious-minded old spinster. 4) a battle-scarred party veteran. Feverish with party zeal. Nemeth first fingers the religious old lady as a "reactionary clericalist...
...Essie Whimple, a mouse-humble cockney-accented taxidermist of crime sensations. When the wax cools on her tableau of a purple-scarf murder before the clues do, and the strangler begins stalking her, poor Essie hides out as a showgirl with a neighboring theatrical troupe. For Essie, a spinster of 29, whose lips have never touched liquor, cigarettes or men, the greatest thrill is to be close to the show's American strong man (Richard Kiley). The problem: who will get whose man first-Scotland Yard or Essie Whimple? In a Keystone chase finale, Essie gets both...