Word: spinsterhood
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...would rather have seen a movie about a woman gripped by a frustrated passion to create than a frustrated passion for a really cute guy. I'll stipulate that in Austen's time spinsterhood was a fate to be strenuously avoided. And being a woman writer was by no means an easy path either. Yet, she embraced it, and the immortal results more than justify a hard choice this film never really explores...
...circumstances require that she be a brick: the death of her father and the loss of Norland, the stately digs where she and her all female family have been safe and content; the genteel but palpable anxiety of her mother (Gemma Jones), trying to be brave as poverty and spinsterhood loom for her girls; the hysterically misplaced passion of her sister Marianne (Kate Winslet)--the "Sensibility" of the title--nearly dying when that cad John Willoughby (Greg Wise) leaves her for a woman better endowed financially; the romantic occlusion that prevents Marianne from seeing what everyone else can see, that...
...there were 119 single men for every 100 single women. What bothered Faludi was not just that the numbers were wrong; it was that many of the stories read like morality tales, whispering threats about the cost of postponing marriage in favor of having a career. Fear of spinsterhood stormed into the popular culture, giving birth to a whole generation of desperate movie heroines, frantic sitcom spinsters, myriad self-help books...
...Theresa's home it's Deirdre (Robin Mosely) who causes trouble. Her IRA husband is in jail for murder and she feels hemmed in by her life with her three young children. Her sister Joan (Susan Pellegrino) is a neat freak on the way to spinsterhood...
...adequate. The quirks and unexpected twists of life are examined with care that exposes layer upon layer of meaning. Loving family relationships, studied unsparingly, pulse with hidden resentments. Social conventions--"exchanging commonplaces and untruths"--are scrutinized to reveal the complexity beneath cool facades. Courtship, marriage, remarriage, cohabitation, bachelorhood and spinsterhood--all achieve an encompassing inventive dimension...