Word: spinsterly
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...countryside in the 1930s. Molly Tredley (Christina Pickles) is a fortyish woman with a frustrated and gnawing need for sex. Her husband Teddy (Michael Higgins), some 20 years her senior, is irascible, quite deaf and has always been impotent. His comforts are booze and the bantering palship of a spinster nurse-companion, Eve (Pauline Flanagan...
...mark of Williams' people. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Chamberlain) is a defrocked minister with a penchant for teen-age girls. The hotel proprietor, Maxine Faulk (Sylvia Miles), fancies young Mexican beachboys. The guardians of the spirit as opposed to the flesh are Hannah Jelkes (Dorothy McGuire), a Nantucket spinster, and her ancient 97-year-old poet grandfather Nonno (William Roerick), on whom Hannah's abiding love and care are centered...
Compare this with the sensitively understated Gilman as prim Miss Prism, Cecily's spinster governess. Severe in a herringbone suit, her frizzy yellow hair drawn back tightly in a bun, Gilman stands in her characteristic pose, hands clasped in front of her, and expresses dismay, skepticism and repressed lust with utter conviction...
...TRANQUIL SURFACE of early married life for Stephanie, the narrator of Lovers and Tyrants, is disturbed by a recurring dream in which she is a middleaged spinster, alone and unloved. The dream is a result of her disappointment, not only with marriage, but with all her close relationships from childhood on. None of the people she has loved, from her nanny, her father and her high school girlfriends to her adult lovers, has provided her with a real sense of comfort and belonging. Instead, each of the loved ones has stunted her emotional growth in some profound...
...novel is a wicked parody. It mocks the genre of relentless felicity and refined sensibility, the kind of writing in which nothing happens but much is felt. "Her heart pressed up weakly against her ribs," the reader learns of Clara, a young working woman of the kind once called "spinster." Or "Clara felt slightly breathless as though the feebleness of the light was a sign of an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen." And (Clara, in perfect health, leaving a hotel) "Clara's ankles felt weak. There seemed no way she would ever get through the revolving doors ahead...