Porch witch
Hearth mistress
Parish foot-maid
Alms-eyes

Live Alone and Like It, Marjorie Hillis

Have you read this yet? It's perfect. It's from the 1930s, so it's wonderfully dated, and it's sprinkled with cautionary tales like The Story Of Miss X, who did not plan out her Saturday and ended up eating crackers grudgingly on the couch.

A Damn Cape With Fur On It

For burrowing into and avoiding eye contact.

Fiction is full of spinsters, each one greater and more terrible than the last. Here are some of the more common species seen in the wild. Ready To Defrost (Harmless/Temporary) There is nothing wrong with these women. More to be pitied than censured; they simply were not born for the Cause. They are more likely to be librarians than anything else. Their glasses exist only to be whipped off. Their hair is up only to be…

Previously from Mary J. Breen: My Sexual Education. When I was a child in the ’50s, one of our favourite card games was Old Maid, the one in which the person with the lone unmatchable card—The Old Maid—is the loser. By age eight, I’d figured out that nobody in real life wanted to be an Old Maid either: no one wanted to be the one left “on the shelf,” the one nobody loved. I’d…