Friday Reads: Some sucked, some weren’t for me, and some sucked me right in youtu.be/4BYjN-XR4gQ #SpinsterSeptember #Victober

Really enjoyed Fair Play, Tove Jansson. “She began to anticipate a solitude of her own. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.“ #SapphicSeptember *technically* #SpinsterSeptember 📚💙

Read: Anita Brookner: Look At Me (1983). Such a sharp, acidic, adult, wonderful book about people and relationships. Minimal plot but full of thoughts and ideas. There will be more Brookner. #SpinsterSeptember

Nuanced spinsters and other fickle folk: A review of E.H. Young's 1922 novel, The Misses Mallett #SpinsterSeptember youtu.be/8oBWAfSCbHo

I was recommending it to someone & that reminded me that I think Rumer Godden's IN THIS HOUSE OF BREDE (I never thought I'd fall in love with a book about a woman joining a contemplative abbey, but it was such a page turner for me-so good) would probably be a good suggestion for #spinsterseptember

A powerful read: I've called "The Spring Begins" by Katherine Dunning "brutal" here, and Simon Thomas calls it "amoral" in his Afterword! It's also lyrical, descriptive and a real page-turner! librofulltime.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/b... @britishlibrary.bsky.social #booksky #SpinsterSeptember 📚💙

A recommendation @pear-jelly.bsky.social. Perfectly controlled pacing: onward and inward journey, past infusing present, emergence of heroine's agency, quiet and subtle and powerful. #spinsterseptember

Read a couple of very good books for the 2 hashtags I'm following. For #SpinsterSeptember, 'Miss Buncle's Book' by D. E. Stevenson was an unalloyed delight. Funny, clever, and very sweet. Social comedy with a smidgen of romance. Stevenson is sharp-eyed but she is never cruel. I bought the sequel.

The two old women of the title are 75 and 80 respectively so you get both decades in one book. :) #booksky #SpinsterSeptember

For #spinsterseptember I return to the wonderful writing of #AnitaBrookner with her third novel, Look At Me - more here! kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/i...

Friday Reads: 'The world is full of wonder – pay attention' youtu.be/hU9PLgad0ww #ShortySeptember #SpinsterSeptember

"...she had never married, and yet, judging from the mask-like indifference of her face, she had gone through twenty times more of passion and experience than those whose loves are trumpeted forth for all the world to hear." #SpinsterSeptember #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/09/18/t...

An odd, little romp which careened from one surreal plot twist and complicated relationship, to another. Protests, pain, philosophy & the plague - all in this unusual love story. Reminscient of Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch & Penelope Fitzgerald, but fell a little flat by comparison. #SpinsterSeptember

My next read for #SpinsterSeptember, this novel about Dorothy Wordsworth is told partly through the eyes of a servant at Rydal Mount, and partly through the imagined words of her destroyed red diary. Beautiful nature writing and some interesting speculation on her later illness. An enjoyable read.

Read: Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952). Another great book for #SpinsterSeptember, and my first Pym. Quietly funny with wonderful observations of British humans in the postwar years: I gobbled it up. PS: Having finally read books by Barbaras Pym and Comyns, I can now tell them apart!

“Her panic-stricken face would be reflected back at her as she struggled to deny her identity, slowly cosseting herself away from the truth. She was learning to triumph over reality, and the truth wad beginning to leave her in peace” — Angel by Elizabeth Taylor, a #spinsterseptember recommendation

Started book 2 for #spinsterseptember today - first line pulled me in straight away 🪦 #booksky

A slow start to #spinsterseptember but book 1 is done ✔️ not technically spinsterlit but a fun, quippy and empathetic look at the lives of single women working in a London department store in the 1930s. Loved it!

A lovely review. Thank you to the literary sisters! Still time to read for a queer take on #SpinsterSeptember

Finished my 2nd #SpinsterSeptember book. Miss Buncle's Book by D E Stevenson. A lovely feelgood book set in an English village. Some great caricatures, goodies & baddies. You can also hear it discussed at @backlisted.bsky.social

Friday Reads: A transformative read—oh, and a novel about sexy black Baptists youtu.be/a10C5Uijyng #ShortySeptember #SpinsterSeptember

My 2nd book for #SpinsterSeptember was not a success, though I wanted to like it. Elizabeth Mavor's 'A Green Equinox' just did not work for me at all and I'm astonished it was nominated for a Booker Prize alongside writers like Bainbridge and Murdoch. Too precious by half. But à chacun son goût.

Are you in the mood for an autumnal #readingchallenge? 🍂Then check out the hashtag #spinsterseptember by @pear-jelly.bsky.social under which many readers post their readings for September featuring unmarried / #spinster characters. I think it's still possible to could join in! 📚 #booksky

Words to live by here from Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women on spaghetti’s threat to romance. #SpinsterSeptember

On the Ramblings today! A book which qualifies for #spinsterseptember AND #shortstoryseptember - and, oh joy, it's Miss Marple!! kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/09/12/t...

Read: Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey (1799/1817). Flirts with some of the tropes of the gothic novel, but is basically a classic Austen, albeit not quite as funny and intelligent as her more mature works. Still: *very* enjoyable. Not sure it qualifies for #SpinsterSeptember.

Nora makes a great point! Sure, the book of the month is at the heart of the podcast, but our "what we're reading" section is important too! This episode features titles published by @graywolfpress.bsky.social @semiotexte.bsky.social @deepvellum.bsky.social among others!

Check out @onebrightbook.bsky.social latest episode to hear what @nonsuchbook.bsky.social is reading for #spinsterseptember “I love spinster novels not for some tale of the diminutive or the suffering but for those who dare to be weird, who dare to be different, who dare to be themselves” #booksky

Friday Reads: Scarlett, Read youtu.be/cAfx7cA7Low #ShortySeptember #SpinsterSeptember

1st book for #SpinsterSeptember is Jane Bowles' seriously odd 'Two Serious Ladies'. While I was tempted to give up on this throughout the first chapter, by the time I read half the second I was hooked. I can't say I ever really "liked" the book, but it is fascinating and compulsively readable.

Read The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, entrant for #SpinsterSeptember. Early on, schoolteacher and artist Nora says she’s single, “what they used to call a spinster, but don’t anymore, because it implies you‘re dried up, and none of us wants to be that.” 📚💙

“You certainly won’t come across anybody quite like Edwina, or any similar situation, in any other novels this #spinsterseptember “

My first contribution to @pear-jelly.bsky.social's #SpinsterSeptember is The House By The Sea by Jon Godden - a novel that really wrong-footed me

“Oh, I say, if we were meant to come back to God, why were we sent out, why were we sent away? I wish for innocence more than anything, but I am conscious only of corruption.” #SpinsterSeptember

Fell into #booksky. Interesting theme for the month, seeing many recommendations of favourites. I’ll check some out on this rare rainy day #SpinsterSeptember

Just finished Joanna Godden by Sheila Kaye-Smith for #SpinsterSeptember. Written 1921, set in a farming community in Romney Marsh. Joanna is a marvelous heroine. Owns a farm, battles the men. Sometimes wins, sometimes loses. She is courageous and fallible.

First book for #SpinsterSeptember a rather sad tale of a woman's annual holiday spent in a hotel on a Danish island, in what was her former home before the war. Some wonderful portraits of the other guests (another spinster among them). A novel about memory and history told and retold.

"How could she live through Hilda’s wedding, and afterwards, too? Evenings alone with Mother, while Hilda sat with her husband, and afterwards Hilda and Albert went upstairs together. Hilda would be a wife, a married woman." #SpinsterSeptember #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/09/04/t...

Read: Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them (1948). A brilliantly evocative historical novel about a convent in the forteenth century, which pulls off the trick of not having a plot arc and yet being a page-turner. Masterly. And my first read of #spinsterseptember.

What I'm reading for #spinsterseptember. My first Brookner!

New on the blog today, I've written about THE SPRING BEGINS by Katherine Dunning. I adored this evocative, beautifully written portrayal of the lives of three very different young women in the 1930s. A new favourite for #SpinsterSeptember! #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/09/04/t...

Such a fabulous list of recommendations for #spinsterseptember compiled by @radzpandit.bsky.social 😍😍😍

And also I recently finished South Riding which I loved, and Sarah Burton’s spinster declaration is glorious: ‘I was born to be a spinster and by God, I’m going to spin’. #SpinsterSeptember

#spinsterseptember quote

“In this humor she seemed more than ever a challenge to his manhood. She was armed at all points. She feared nothing that he might say. No flush of apprehension; no nervous tremor; no weak self-consciousness. Yet he saw her as a woman, and desirable.” #SpinsterSeptember

"Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionable clothes, but she is plain and – almost worse in those times – intelligent." Found an audiobook for #SpinsterSeptember, narrated by Julian Clary

ICYMI at the weekend… #SpinsterSeptember #BookSky 💙📚

And if I may suggest my own Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves, two women who were very happy to let those around them think they were spinsters. See pinned thread #SpinsterSeptember www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/free-content...

Ten recommendations from me for #SpinsterSeptember with a particular focus on books I've read and loved in the last couple of years. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/09/01/s...

Our #FurrowedMiddlebrow spinsters are ready for #SpinsterSeptember with @pear-jelly.bsky.social 📚