Ten top spinsters in literature

Rachel Cooke, an award-winning journalist who writes for the Observer and is the television critic for the New Statesman, is the author of Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties.

One of Cooke's top ten single women, as shared at the Guardian:Miss Havisham

Driven half-mad by her lover’s desertion on their wedding day, the star of Dickens’s 13th novel, Great Expectations,