The Spinster Diaries by Gina Fattore

Author:Gina Fattore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Published: 2019-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

Jeremiah Crutchley makes his first appearance in Part Two of my six-part miniseries, which is where I’m currently stuck—unable to move forward due to medical scanning appointments, career indecision, Journaling for Anxiety™, fear of not having a day job, etc., etc., &c. Plus, my ill-fated attempt to write a traditional, by-the-numbers Hollywood romantic comedy gobbled up three solid months of writing time that might have been more wisely spent writing an eighteenth-century romantic comedy about Fanny Burney and Jeremiah Crutchley. Fanny was twenty-nine the summer she spent hanging out with him at Mrs. Thrale’s country house, and twenty-nine is always a dangerous age in GirlWorld. He was thirty-six, loved to hunt, was incredibly lacking in self-confidence, and totally shared Fanny’s conviction that Johnson’s Life of Pope was the best of the Lives—tons better than, say, his Life of Dryden or his Life of Swift. He sounds nice, right? And he wasn’t just nice; he also had this other characteristic that has historically played super well in romantic comedies: he was rich. I’m not sure how rich, but he had an estate. You know, like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Of course, looks-wise, he was no Colin Firth. We know this because Fanny’s BFF Mrs. Thrale once described Jeremiah Crutchley in her diaries—which you can also get your hands on if you are that obsessed—as “ugly & aukward.” Fanny, for her part, never described what Jeremiah Crutchley looked like. But then again, Fanny never described what anybody looked like. Not even the characters in her very own novels. This could be a sign of how totally not-shallow she was. How poorly she would have fit in here in contemporary, twenty-first-century LA, because in the end, she cared more about what people were like—the content of their characters, their thoughts, their feelings—than about what they looked like.

Or it could just be a sign that she was totally fucking nearsighted.

None of the impoverished academics who study Fanny seem to linger too long on this question, but her diaries are actually filled with moments where she’s squinting across a crowded room at someone, not exactly sure who they are. You know, as in “Maybe that’s Edmund Burke?” They definitely had spectacles back then, right? I mean, we’ve all seen cartoon Ben Franklin wearing his, but I guess it wasn’t necessarily considered “proper” to wear them in “company,” and lord knows contacts weren’t an option, so what was a nearsighted spinster to do back then? In Fanny’s case, she usually erred on the side of hanging back and not saying hello to people.

This was probably a smart thing to do, etiquette-wise, because circa 1781, they had tons of super complicated rules about who could talk to whom. But maybe it also explains how she wound up being a spinster in the first place. Makes sense, right? Obviously, if you hang back a lot at parties, you’re probably not meeting tons of people. You’re not, as we would say in the modern parlance, “putting yourself out there.

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