Abstract
This chapter looks at the representation of ageing women in relation to the construction of spinsterhood in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short fiction, spanning the author’s long writing career from the interwar period in the 1930s to her later work in the 1960s. Taking Warner’s most famous ageing spinster Lolly Willowes as its starting-point, it analyses the construction of spinsterhood in a selection of Warner’s critically neglected short stories, demonstrating the author’s increasingly subversive critique of a youth culture that marginalises the old and unmarried.
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Notes
- 1.
Doan’s identification of this technique specifically relates to the representation of the spinster in the fiction of Barbara Pym, but is applicable to Warner’s stories.
- 2.
A nosegay is an old term for a small posy of flowers, which can be worn as a decorative adornment for the purposes of a special occasion.
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McGlynn, C. (2017). “No One Noticed Her”: Ageing Spinsters and Youth Culture in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Short Stories. In: McGlynn, C., O'Neill, M., Schrage-Früh, M. (eds) Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63609-2_7
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