India Knight: ‘Chick lit is in its death throes’
In 1963 Cliff Richard had a No 1 hit with Bachelor Boy, which remained at the top of the charts for three weeks. The song is about a father advising his son to remain a “bachelor boy” until his “dying day”. Every time I hear it, I reduce myself to complete hilarity by imagining, say, Alma Cogan, delightedly singing “Spinstery Girl” – “and that’s the way I’ll stay-ay!” – while everyone in the country hums along approvingly, thumbs aloft. A single woman is a complicated thing, for society and for novelists (though not usually for songwriters, for whom she and her broken heart are bread and butter). A single woman of a certain age – a spinster – is more alarming still. Spinsters! Brr. All desiccated and withered, all lonely, all weird. Whiskery, probably. Cat-loving, stout-shoed, possessed of unusually intense and unsettling internal narratives, like Barbara Covett in Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. It’s never helped that while bachelordom was presented as groovy – James Bond, say – spinsterhood has always seemed like an imposition. Bond gads about sexily, and no little lady can pin him down, but a woman placed on a shelf gathers dust and can’t get down by herself.
What’s odd is that the spinster has a perfectly respectable literary history, from Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, resisting wedlock with every iota of her being, to Barbara Pym’s contentedly solo heroines, via – well, so many: Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma, Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia, Lady Slane in Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, among others – not to mention George Gissing’s remarkable The Odd Women, written in 1893 (“But I am proud of your magnificent independence, proud of your pride, and of your stainless heart. Thank heaven we are women!”). Where the necessity of marriage was a daily preoccupation, the need was financial first and social second. Spinsterhood – either per se or in the form of widowhood – was not considered offensive or problematic of itself (see, for instance, Miss Matty Jenkyns in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford).
And then along came Bridget Jones, and blew those contented feminine lives out of the water. The fear – the terror, really – of spinsterhood is what drives what we used to call chick lit. Pre-Bridget, the young-woman-coming-of-age novel was not a quest for marriage: in Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado (1958), the heroine Sally Jay Gorce shags her way round Paris, having a lovely time, with no unpleasant repercussions at all. No, Bridget Jones started it, I’m afraid: in among the excellent jokes and the charming self-deprecation, there runs a demoralising little thread of self-loathing that can only eventually be assuaged by our heroine finding not herself but a man. At least Helen Fielding is a wonderful comic writer; in less assured hands, this woeful scenario can read like a literary form of self-harm. Often, in these books or their sequels, the acquiring of a partner isn’t enough, it merely begins the arduous business of holding on to him, because of course that’s what other, still-single women do: scan rooms with dead-eyed stares, wondering whose husband to nick.
Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant In Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason Photograph: Miramax/Sportsphoto
It’s depressing, and it’s a depressing way of looking at love. Now I think about it, it doesn’t surprise me at all that my first proper literary crushes were on Pym’s heroines. Almost all of these are spinsters, or widowed, or firmly on the shelf (at 29, in one case), but far from leading dusty, cat-rich existences, they take infinite delight in the minutiae of everyday life, especially if it involves curates or anthropologists or dahlias. They are terrifically funny, self-aware (mostly), pleased to exist, and not at all sorry for themselves. They love food, books and, usually, church. They’re my go-to spinsters, those women, and they still make me feel an odd sort of regret when I’m near the British Museum – Pym Central in my head, if not in the novels themselves: what nice, quiet, fulfilling bookish lives might be lived in rented Bloomsbury rooms.
Instead of fretting about calories and possible rivals, literary spinsters celebrated female friendship, female intimacy and the underrated, undercelebrated notion of pottering along companionably. The excellent news is that, after a long period of absence, spinsters are back. They have never wholly gone away, if you knew where to look: the ass-kicking lady detectives saw to that. But they are back in the mainstream, because as our appetite for chick lit fades away, we have developed an appetite for the psychological thriller, often featuring a not-so-nice solo heroine: in Natalie Young’s Season to Taste – an extreme example, admittedly – the narrator cannibalises her husband); in Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard, the narrator is only nominally married – before her unravelling she is a spinster of the mind, of a certain age, brisk, a femme serieuse; in Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests, Frances Wray is spinsterhood (of a specific kind – the book is set in 1922) personified. But we want more from our spinsters, these days, than a sort of genteel fading out; we like it when a metaphorical bomb is lobbed into their front rooms.
We can’t get enough of risk-taking Spinster 2.0, with her jangled nerves and new-found reserves of strength. But I still yearn for the old-fashioned kind, too, whose small pastimes and small pleasures painted such a satisfying picture of a rich inner life (and yes, I do know about Anita Brookner, but – the gloom). Perhaps those books would be considered boring now, or self-indulgent (“nothing happens!”), or somehow too quiet. But it is precisely this quietness that I find so deeply satisfying in Pym, and that sends me hurtling back to her three or four times a year: quietness with nothing to disrupt it other than very funny, mordant jokes. Meanwhile, those of us who grew up with chick lit find it hasn’t evolved at all, which is perhaps why it’s in its dying throes. There’s surely a market for comfort reads about grownup women, rather than superannuated “girls”.

In Your Prime by India Knight is published by Fig Tree