Muriel Spark’s novels of the early 1960s teem with ‘old maids of settled character’, ‘intellectually glamorous’ women who share the ‘graceful attributes of a common poverty’ (The Girls of Slender Means). Spark’s spinsters live lives out of synch with conventional family structures, offering the reader a portrait of female experience unbound by ‘significant others’. Far from the stereotype of the vulnerable, pitiable or desperate childless single woman (aka ‘the dried up spinster’), and unlike her callow, amoral bachelors and widowers (The Bachelors, The Ballad of Peckham Rye), Spark’s female lodgers and landladies are frequently independent, idiosyncratic and resourceful, with rich, complex inner lives. Yet in spite of their recurrence in twentieth century and contemporary fiction, these exemplars of women’s experience ‘beyond the family’, and the specificities of their circumstances, have been frequently overlooked in recent scholarship.
This paper seeks to examine and reclaim the domestic lives of middle-aged or elderly single women living in rented accommodation through an examination of the quotidian and everyday experience of characters such as Collie, Greggie and Jamie in Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means and similarly charismatic, complex characters in the novels of Patrick Hamilton (The Slaves of Solitude), Doris Lessing (The Good Terrorist), William Trevor (The Boarding House) and Sarah Waters (The Paying Guests).