SINGLE LIVES: MODERN WOMEN IN LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND FILM. Edited by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey. Rutgers UP, 2022. 240 pp. including bibliography and index. $36.95 softbound.

All persons are born single, and most eventually die without a partner. In today’s West these truisms, combined with high divorce rates and an accelerating trend toward lifelong singleness, could imply singleness is (at least) “a” new normal. Yet stereotypes persist, and women especially report pressures to find romance, get married, and embrace the traditional “happily ever after.” The growing field of singleness studies invites us to explore, question, and challenge traditional attitudes toward singleness and measure them against realities old and new. In their introduction to Single Lives, University College Dublin in Ireland professors Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey cite recent works analyzing female singleness from an historical, sociological, psychological, or literary perspective, but they argue for a much broader understanding of singleness “as a flexible and varied state emerging throughout an individual’s life span, including the never-married and the widowed, separated, and divorced” (5), and they stress the need to welcome insights from multiple branches of the humanities.1 Five of Single Lives’ ten essays deal largely or entirely with screen portrayals of single women. They include two studies of literature-to-film adaptations: Jennifer S. Clark’s “Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything” (28–47) and Martina Mastandrea’s “F. Scott Fitzgerald and ‘The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony’: The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen” (81–101). Clark sifts through a rich array of archives (“letters, memoirs, production reports, publicity, and correspondence [concerning production]”) (29)—documenting women’s creative involvement in the 1959 film version of The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s fact-based tale about urban, white-collar “girls.” Besides Jaffe herself, who resisted the boundaries imposed on her as “mere” consultant, the women who helped prepare Best of Everything for the screen, included Phyllis Levy; Jaffe’s editor; Dusty Negulesco; the director’s wife; and Edith Sommer, scriptwriter. Clark argues that despite the film’s glossy visual effects and use of melodramatic pathos—in lieu of the novel’s more complex realism—it retains more of the novel’s strengths than casual viewers might realize, thanks largely to women’s involvement. She reveals how Negulesco’s feedback helped restore humanity to the character of Amanda Farrow, the hard-edged boss acted by Joan Crawford, and how Jaffe’s refusal to be just a trivia expert sparked real-life drama. Clark also states that “secretaries at 20th CenturyFox” helped “shape” the film (29), but she provides no evidence for this intriguing claim. Mastandrea considers three Fitzgerald tales depicting intelligent, marriage-averse “flappers” vis à vis how they were or might have been interpreted for the screen. “Might have been” applies to This Side of Paradise because the film was never made, even though Fitzgerald himself penned a synopsis. He planned to do more with flappers Eleanor and Rosalind, placing them “in their historical and social context and play[ing] with stereotypes and types” (90). Whether the deal fell through because Fitzgerald’s ideas about women were deemed too radical for the screen, or because the plan to cast Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda in starring roles proved unworkable, Mastandrea doesn’t say; perhaps no one knows.2 Hollywood did, however, make versions of “Myra Meets His Family” and “The Offshore Pirate”; both films are presumed lost but were, as Mastandrea carefully shows, well documented and popular in their day (1920–1921). The contrast between text and film was sharp in the case of “Myra,” who in the text “chooses self-respect and singleness” (91) over marriage to a manipulative rich man, but who onscreen became “The Husband Hunter” and did marry her catch. In both the original and the movie of “Off-Shore Pirate,” the heroine refuses to meet a would-be suitor—the man her uncle wants her to marry—but falls in love with him when he impersonates a pirate. Mastandrea suggests that by playing up Arnita’s risky, wild-child behaviors, the film nudged viewers to hope she would marry; on the other hand, by making Arnita wise to Toby’s identity, the film gave her an extra dash of self-agency and wit which workingclass (including black) female viewers likely enjoyed. In subsequent decades, young, single female characters with “minds of their own” continued lighting up the screen. Noteworthy were Gidget, a California teen played originally by Sandra Dee, and lovable nannies Fraulein Maria and Mary Poppins, as played by Julie Andrews. A chapter from Pamela Robertson Wojcik’s book on the Gidget franchise, “Becoming Single: Gidget ‘Betwixt and Between’” (69–80) explores Gidget’s “work and process” of becoming a single adult, experimenting with relationships and sensualities, trying to figure out what she wants. I especially liked Wojcik’s thoughtful treatment of the Gidget-B. L. friendship, which arguably “teases lesbianism” (77) but is at any rate close and sisterlike. The “slightly butch” B. L., who coaches Gidget on surfing techniques and bosom building, is strikingly like Elaine, best friend to the protagonist in Beverly Cleary’s Jean and Johnny, who encourages Jean to take off her glasses and trim her bangs and teaches her how to dance. Cleary’s novel appeared in 1959, the same year Gidget hit the screen, and there may be fertile ground here for future analyses of girls’ friendships. In “All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary” (175–192), Ann Mattis explores the type of the refined yet fun-loving single white nanny who redeems a “distressed nuclear family” (182) through literal or figurative magic. Mattis suggests that Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music felt reassuring to postwar audiences on two levels: they affirmed the basic rightness of traditional family norms, and they implied society had little to fear from single women (or, for that matter, anyone else who—like chimney-sweep Bert—dwelt on society’s margins). Even BOOK REVIEWS