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Geographic restrictions and teasancies apply 18 plus. Every age has had a different way of describing a woman who exists alone, rather than as part of a couple.

Today, she might just call herself single.

But at different times in the past, people might have referred to her,

often with contempt, as an old maid, a bachelor girl, a spinster or a singleton. For most of history

this has been considered to be a pitiful state against the natural order of

things as if a woman without a man,

because until the very recent past it would have been thought that it was a man she needed,

of course, was somehow incomplete and lesser.

After the First World War, there was a great flowering of female independence as more women chose to live single lives.

This change and the backlash to it

is all there to be found in the murder mysteries of the period

if you just dig a little below the surface.

From self-contained professional women like Mary Whitaker in Dorothy L. Sayers unnatural death,

to dear fluffy Miss Marple, there are a multitude of single women's lives to discover.

But let's go back to the beginning.

This particular story starts with the surplus women.

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