New Books In Literary Studies

“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less has been told of the life of the unmarried woman.” One can only hope that Kate Bolick‘s Spinster is a sign that, nearly thirty years later, the circumstances Heilbrun described are, at long last, about to change. Bolick burst onto the national scene when her article in The Atlantic, entitled “All the Single Ladies,” went viral in November 2011. But Spinster is a departure from her reportage rather than a continuation or a sequel– a biographical/autobiographical/sociological mash-up that is engaging, observant, and fiercely critical. Examining the socio-historical phenomenon of the feme sole, Bolick mines her own experiences and the lives she’s read about to examine how, as Heilbrun suggested, we use the stories of other lives to navigate our own. R