Word: spinsterly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Died. Dame Rose Macaulay, 77, British novelist (Potterism, The World My Wilderness, The Towers of Trebizond), essayist, satirist; of a heart attack soon after signing a telegram from British writers to the Union of Soviet Writers protesting the expulsion of Nobel Prizewinner Boris Pasternak (see FOREIGN NEWS) ; in London. Spinster daughter of a Cambridge don and distant kin to Historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, Dame Rose was raised in Italy, where her mother had been sent for her health. The sunny freedom of a girlhood on the Ligurian coast prepared her for anything but the spiny conventionalities of the traditional education...
...speakers are three schoolboys of present-day Paris who have "decided to model their lives on those of distinguished men." Bored by both their ordinary selves and their ordinary lives, they dream of rebellion, plots and seductions. Their big day comes when a worried spinster, who lives with an aristocratic family just outside Paris, tells "Valmont" about a plot worthy of Dumas: the haughty old head of the family has locked and bolted his pretty daughter Denise into her bedroom and will not let her out until she swears to break off an affair with a middleaged, married antique dealer...
...warmly human, quietly humorous mysteries, after a stock-market panic in 1903 threw the Rinehart family $12,000 in debt. When Staircase sold (1,250,000 copies so far), she went on writing, reached her popular peak in the era of her serialized (Sateve-post) sentimental adventures of a spinster named "Tish," still sternly kept regular office hours in her 70s. Mrs. Rinehart once shrewdly appraised her own honorable journeyman status in letters: "If I agonized like a Chekhov over my work, and I did, the resemblance ceased there...
Miss Page turned in consummate portrayals of the divorcee and the spinster (which Margaret Leighton attempted so inadequately in the pre-Broadway tryout here two years ago). Her performance in either play alone would have been an impressive achievement. But her ability to undergo such a transformation during intermission was almost uncanny. And this was much more than a change of costume, makeup and wig; she did it through her posture, gait, gesture, diction and other ways. Through extraordinary muscular control, she was able to change her whole repertory of facial contours from those of a stunning beauty to those...
...spinster, as the really grandes dames usually are. And she is known to sit quietly in a straightback mahogany chair--Colonial period-- in a drawing room of shadows, counting her memories on a rosary. She accepts visitors and offers them...