Bachelor Girl Read Online Free Page B

wifehood…schooled in the gracious arts, who fails so much as to wed? We witness the unfolding of a tragical redundant class.”
    These perceived changes were amply documented in the 1851 British census. It seemed that there were in England 405,000 more women than men, creating a surplus in all segments of the female population. * Known as redundant or superfluous women, they officially became a social problem, and one with no easy remedy. Those who worked would compete for a limited number of jobs. And there were those who could not quite bring themselves to work. The pamphlet Dedicated to the Refined Young Lady, reprinted consistently from 1860 to 1905, dictated that one might make her way, without loss of station, in lace making, fancy needlework, or as a “paid reading partner.” She might also, under an assumed name, sell canned jams and jellies, write love stories for magazines, or give “dramatic readings.” The pursuit of an actual job, however, was impossible, for to work in an office, “to stamp envelopes…would greatly decrease the likelihood of marriage.” The better girl might work “for cake” but not “for bread.” (It should also be said that this girl might not be cut out to do real work of any kind. The résumé of Mattie Silver, the central female character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, typifies the situation: “Her equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molassescandy, recite ‘The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,’ and play ‘The Lost Chord,’ and a pot-pourri from ‘Carmen.’”)
    Yet many, of course, were left with few choices. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were among those who routinely made visits to local “intelligence,” or employment, offices to apply for the scant number of jobs hundreds had applied for already. In Charlotte’s case, the jobs she eventually secured provided background and details for three of the most complex single heroines in all literature: the stoical Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone of Shirley (1849), and, my favorite, Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853), a boarding-school teacher so fiercely self-contained—she has suffered a severe trauma she cannot speak of—that Jane Eyre, in comparison, seems like a gay lady at Mr. Rochester’s house party. When left alone at the school during a holiday, Lucy suffers one of the most realistic nervous breakdowns in all literature. If not strictly autobiographical, this episode suggests that the author at a young age knew the misery of enforced, impenetrable solitude.
    William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, intending to praise Charlotte Brontë, that she was “that fiery little eager brave…tremulous creature!” As he explained, “[I] see that rather than any other earthly good…she wants some Tomkins to love her and to be in love with her. But you see this is a little bit of a creature, without a penny of good looks, thirty years old, I should think, buried in the country.” She was a spinster. But at least a spinster with talent.
    With so many others lacking literary or any other talents, what was Great Britain to do? The most famed proposal, entirely serious, came from one W. R. Gregg, a conservative commentator, in 1862. In his view it was essential that the British “restore by emigration of women that proportion between the sexes in the old country and in the newer ones.” The difficulty, he imagined, would be “chiefly mechanical. It is not easy to convey a multitude of women across the Atlantic or the Antipodes by an ordinary means…. Totransport the half million from where they are redundant to where they are wanted at an average of 30 passengers a ship would require 10,000 vessels, or at least 10,000 voyages.” (To clarify, the only transport of women out of Great Britain for reasons of marital status had occurred years earlier, when “purchase brides” had been shipped to the Virginia Colony for the “price of transport.”)
    Gregg was ready for his