We writers of historical romance are usually also writing about marriage. Marriage may not be the goal of our heroes and heroines when the story starts, but most books (mine included) expect love and marriage to go hand in hand, or at least to come together by the time the story is done.

Yet many women in real life were single.

For a start, out of a population of 16 million, more than 300,000 British men died in the Napoleonic wars between 1804 and 1815. That’s a huge number of men of marriageable age – probably close to 1 in 12. Men were also more likely to indulge in risk-taking behaviour in their leisure, and to belong to risky occupations, further increasing the gender imbalance.

And men were not subject to social stigma if they did not marry, and had easy access to many of the benefits of marriage (with one in five women in London, according to some researchers, earning their living from the sale of sex).

So even if our late Georgian miss wanted to marry, she may not have had the opportunity. Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra:

‘There is a great scarcity of Men in general, & a still greater scarcity of any that were good for much.’

Beyond that, though, our Miss may not have wished to marry. Married women had few rights. The principle of coverture — that a woman was ‘covered’ by her husband’s protection and authority — meant that women lived at the mercy of their husbands, physically, emotionally, and financially.

Yet what is remarkable, unmarried women were more legally independent than the married ones. Single women could own property, pay taxes to the state, and vote in the local parish, none of which married women were allowed to do. [Women in the middle class in the 19th Century]

And the health risks of pregnancy concerned many women. With a maternal death rate of one in 1000 live births, and an average of five children per mother, women had a two or three percent chance of dying in or shortly after childbirth.

Yet there was also pressure to marry. For a respectable woman to have her own home almost always meant marriage, unless she had particularly enlightened or indulgent male relations. For the rest, being single meant living in the home of a relative, and being subject to the authority of the male head of the house.  Besides that, being single carried a stigma, at least in the upper classes and in the growing middle classes who trumpeted their status by insisting on their own women being confined to the domestic sphere.

The stigma showed in the labels applied to single women whose age made them unlikely to wed. Spinster was originally a job title. By the early 19th century it was applied to unwed women who were past their first youth, and had begun to collect adjectives such as ‘withered’, ‘sour’, and ‘old maid’. The term ape leader comes from an English saying that women who fail to do their duty by marrying and procreating are doomed to lead apes in hell. The term ‘old maid’ is also derogatory. A maid was originally a term for a young girl, so an old maid hasn’t accepted the responsibilities of adulthood. (Note that the terms for a bachelor are not perjorative.) ‘On the shelf’ — that is, put into store because nobody wants it — comes a bit later, in the late 1830s, but the basic idea is the same: women who don’t marry are failures.

Indeed, I can’t help but feel that, since men held all the power in a marriage relationship, they needed such insulting attitudes to corral women who would otherwise refuse to be part of the marriage market. (Of course, any romance writer could have told them that a modicum of respect and affection would better serve their purposes.)

It’s hard to tell how many women were single. Marital status was not systematically collected in statistics until the middle of the century. But at that time, one in three women were not married. Florence Nightingale commented on the general belief that women had no more important role than to marry and have children.

Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted, except “suckling their fools”; and women themselves have accepted this, have written books to support it, and have trained themselves so as to consider whatever they do as not of such value to the world as others, but that they can throw it up at the first “claim of social life”. They have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their “duty” to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves.

Women never have an half-hour in all their lives (except before and after anybody is up in the house) that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone. Why do people sit up late, or, more rarely, get up so early? Not because the day is not long enough, but because they have “no time in the day to themselves”.

The family? It is too narrow a field for the development of an immortal spirit, be that spirit male or female. The family uses people, not for what they are, not for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants for – its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be. This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, others to silent misery.

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Most of the women in Storm & Shelter are past the Regency concept of the marital use-by date, and at least two are certain they will never marry.  The book is on presale and to be published next Tuesday. Grab it while it is only 99c, and read about the two fleeing heiresses, one of them ‘ruined’, the widow, the pirate, the teacher, and the lady’s maid. And more. Eight great novellas.