spinster

French-American author Lauren Elkin, who writes on art and culture, said a mythology pervaded that she was "this reclusive spinster that never left her house and lived at home with her cat making her paintings".

From BBC ● Feb. 7, 2026

“I’m a geriatric pregnant spinster who puts crystals in her bra,” Helen says in an unusual moment of self-awareness.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 15, 2025

Buzzi herself told The Times in 2011 about working with John Wayne on the variety show, including in one sketch where Gladys wasn’t a spinster.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 2, 2025

"She's described in the record as a spinster," said Prof English.

From BBC ● Dec. 25, 2024

She was a spinster teacher from school, one of the strict ones.

From "Between Shades of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys

The closest I have found have been eccentric spinsters and ambivalent parents, in a long line from Doris Lessing and DH Lawrence, Barbara Pym and Rachel Cusk.

From The Guardian ● Jul. 25, 2020

As her New York Times obituary put it, “She specialized in sourness, or, more politely, acerbity, which she used to her comic advantage in roles as housekeepers, spinsters, wicked stepmothers, nuns and back-talking secretaries.”

From Slate ● Aug. 16, 2019

Considered spinsters back East, both Curtis and Stanley married younger men out West.

From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 24, 2015

Southern belles, frustrated spinsters, power-hungry TV execs, nuns, clergymen and even kings and queens.

From BBC ● Feb. 25, 2012

For the greater number of her twenty-nine years, Bibi Haldar suffered from an ailment that baffled family, friends, priests, palmists, spinsters, gem therapists, prophets, and fools.

From "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri