"Chick lit is in its death throes"

Bridget Jones look out – a new breed of risk-taking, not-so-nice literary heroines is replacing the sad singletons

• India Knight - The Guardian, Friday 24 October 2014 

Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal, Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones, and Julia Stiles as ‘the shrew’ in Ten Things I Hate About You Photograph: PR

In 1963 Cliff Richard had a No 1 hit with Bachelor Boy, which remained at the top of the charts for three weeks. The song is about a father advising his son to remain a “bachelor boy” until his “dying day”. Every time I hear it, I reduce myself to complete hilarity by imagining, say, Alma Cogan, delightedly singing “Spinstery Girl” – “and that’s the way I’ll stay-ay!” – while everyone in the country hums along approvingly, thumbs aloft. A single woman is a complicated thing, for society and for novelists (though not usually for songwriters, for whom she and her broken heart are bread and butter). A single woman of a certain age – a spinster – is more alarming still. Spinsters! Brr. All desiccated and withered, all lonely, all weird. Whiskery, probably. Cat-loving, stout-shoed, possessed of unusually intense and unsettling internal narratives, like Barbara Covett in Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. 
It’s never helped that while bachelordom was presented as groovy – James Bond, say – spinsterhood has always seemed like an imposition. Bond gads about sexily, and no little lady can pin him down, but a woman placed on a shelf gathers dust and can’t get down by herself.
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