Belfast's Number One Spinster

First presented at the John Hewitt Summer School in Armagh, July 2021 as part of the Brian Moore 100 celebrations.

While the dolmens surrounding John Montague’s childhood were regular old people, my own early years were witnessed by a vast cloud of rural spinsters. There was an aunt who wasn’t really an aunt; a whispy Miss Haversham-type who appeared on birthdays and at Christmas, her gifts suited to a much younger child. And a nice woman who gave me a lift to Sunday School and kept a never-ending supply of fruit pastilles in her glove box. She was forty, then fifty, when I knew her. She’d been engaged in her thirties but, like a character lifted from Jane Austen, couldn’t marry nor leave the family home until her elderly parents died. Better perhaps, the retired organist, who wasn’t a spinster in the strictest sense. She had a fella. She called him, her ‘boyfriend’ though she was in her seventies and he, his eighties and they only dated on Saturday nights, when they’d share a chaste fish supper in a layby on the outskirts of town. I’d a lot of time for her. She was making the most of spinsterhood.

Fictional spinsters also dominated my reading. My first love was Christie’s Miss Marple. It was clear to me that marriage would only have interrupted Miss Marple’s true passions: gossip, gardening and homicide. Muriel Spark’s infamous schoolteacher, Jean Brodie offered me a similarly enticing snapshot of spinsterhood: a passionate, creative woman “in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders,” who could think for herself, no need for a man. Less attractive were the left-behind women who populated Janet McNeill’s novels, The Maiden Dinosaur and Tea at Four O’Clock. Here spinsterhood was not presented as an autonomous, empowering choice so much as a state of perpetual suspension thrust upon women who didn’t manage to hook a husband quick enough. Finally, there were the Brontës who straddled the world between real and fictional models of spinsterhood. Only Charlotte ever married and she was dead within a year of it. I romanticised their lonely existence. I liked the way the Brontës took on male pseudonyms in order to be published. I read into this a two-fingered stab at the patriarchy rather than necessity. At sixteen I wished to be Emily Brontë. This is probably where it all went wrong.

Because I now find myself a confirmed spinster at 41. Whilst I’ve drawn the line at acquiring cats, I do live alone with my books and my wine. I lack the energy or the inclination to change this arrangement. I find it a very pleasant way to exist. However, there are still those moments when single life is an uphill slog. For example: surviving the Northern Irish wedding without a plus one, building larger pieces of flatpack furniture and consuming a whole pan loaf before it goes off – all of which are two person jobs. It’s at times like these that I turn to Northern Ireland’s Number One Spinster for guidance and encouragement. No prizes for guessing: my text for today is, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. I’ve learnt so much about navigating singleness through multiple re-readings of this novel. In fairness, it’s mostly a cautionary list of things not to do and folks to avoid, but it’s nonetheless useful. We can all learn something from Judy Hearne.

First, a few words of introduction, in case you’re not familiar with the book. Judith Hearne was the first, and arguably best of Brian Moore’s serious literary novels. Published in 1955 it began life nine years earlier as a short story titled ‘A Friend of the Family.’ It was later adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Bob Hoskins and Dame Maggie Smith in the eponymous role. The novel is chiefly set in a run-down boarding house in the University quarter of Belfast. It is, like many of Moore’s Belfast-based novels significant for both its familiarity with the city and the critical eye he casts over the place and community he grew up with. It focuses upon the life of Judith Hearne, a middle-aged spinster who has fallen upon hard times and falls even further when a failed relationship with her landlady’s boorish brother, leads her down a path of alcoholism. By the novel’s close she has blasphemously questioned her Catholic faith and been removed to a kind of convalescent home for women of a nervous disposition. The denouement of Judith Hearne always reminds me of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar. Both are women, ill-served by their circumstances who search for kindness in friends and strangers and are repeatedly reminded that there is no real place for an independent unmarried woman within the society of their day.  

The character of Judith Hearne is based upon a somewhat tedious, elderly women who regularly visited the Moores when Brian was young. However, biographer Patricia Craig also writes that although Hearne “is not me – very much not me!” according to Brian Moore, albeit a mite disingenuously, there were qualities and experiences they had in common. Being, “lonely and not good-looking,” were two he specified.” Indeed, the novel touches upon all the key themes of a Brian Moore text: fractured familial relations, repressed sexuality and Catholic guilt, disenchantment with the city of his birth and a lingering sense of failure which permeates everything poor Judith Hearne touches.

A recent re-reading reminded me how much Judith Hearne resonates with Moore’s next novel, 1958’s The Feast of Lupercal. However, in this case it isn’t a spinster, but a lonely bachelor -Mr Devine- who fails to capitalise on a relationship which might have elevated him out of his miserable, solitary life. Both are novels about desperate people doing their best to appear competent whilst their loneliness gradually wears them down. Perhaps if circumstances had been different Mr Devine might’ve crossed paths with Judith Hearne and found in each other some meagre form of salvation. Failed forty something piano teacher meets failed thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher and romance blossoms on the streets of Belfast. I’m digressing into fantasy here. Brian Moore hadn’t much truck with happy endings. For the most part he liked his protagonists thwarted and miserable. You can tell from the opening scene of Judith Hearne that she’s never going to escape the clutches of the dead aunt whose photo she carts around from one shabby room to another or her battered Sacred Heart. And lo and behold, the novel closes with Christ and the dead aunt watching over Judith whilst she lies in her room in the mad house. With them pair permanently standing guard, no man was ever for getting his hands on Judy’s spinsterhood.

I do believe Judith Hearne was a victim of her era. Two subsequent wars had left an inordinate amount of women with limited options when it came to marriage partners. The situation’s not dissimilar in Ulster today, where there just aren’t enough straight men to go around. There are moments reading the novel, when I find it difficult to reel my contemporary feminist in. I want to scream at Judith Hearne, don’t trust Mr Madden, he’s all big talk and bluster. He isn’t interested in you romantically. But Judith Hearne has placed the male species on a pillar. “O, that’s not like Ireland, Mr Madden,” she tells him. “Why the men are gods here, I honestly do believe.” Just walk away Judy, while you still can. The same goes for the manipulative Aunt who raises her and, when bedridden, insists Judith give up her career prospects to stay home and be a fulltime carer. This would have been an entirely different spinster novel if Judith had kept up her typing or her teaching, establishing some degree of independence. She could have been Jean Brodie instead of the trapped and terrified woman Moore introduces us to.

Arguably Judith Hearne’s chief problem is not her poverty or the alcoholism which begins with a single medicinal drop and ends with drunken caterwauling and an early expulsion from yet another boarding house. Judith Hearne is chronically incapable of taking control of her own life. Again and again she folds beneath the weight of others’ expectations. On the micro level she’s manipulated by a series of individuals who do not care about her well-being. The elderly aunt, Mr Madden (who’s only after the savings she doesn’t have) and even the O’Neill family who she visits each Sunday, naively choosing to believe they actually care about the minutia of her life. She goes as far as filtering her everyday experiences through the lens of how she’ll present these happenings to the O’Neills, “for it was important to have things to tell which interested her friends.” In a sense Judith Hearne’s so consistently aware of the other’s gaze, she is not properly present in her own life. This is particularly disturbing when Moore reveals that the O’Neills enjoy mocking her behind her back.

On a deeper and more basic level, Judith Hearne is the victim of society. Socially and economically it would’ve been almost impossible for her to prosper as a single woman with no independent means. Furthermore, the Catholic church is a heavy and destructive presence looming over Judith’s life. Continuously called to submit to the doctrines of the church and the role which it has prescribed for women, Judith becomes increasingly disillusioned with her faith. The scene towards the novel’s close where she rails against Catholicism, making a holy show of herself, drunk and disorderly in her local chapel, might have been the beginning of her emancipation. Instead, it buys Judith Hearne a place in the mad house.

 Judith Hearne is what you might call a ‘spinster in time;’ a product and victim of the age that birthed her. There’s no point petitioning Moore to liberate Judith or hoping she might rebel. I find myself reading this novel as a spinster of roughly her age, wishing Judith Hearne had lived to see the way things would change for women. “Oh Judy,” I’d like to tell her, “you wouldn’t recognise Belfast these days. You don’t need a man to make something of yourself. All you need is a bit of gumption, and a room of your own with no bloody Sacred Heart starting down at you, maybe a wee bit of imagination, which you had in spades. I’m thinking of the way you constantly reinvented yourself and how you talked to those “little shoe eyes.” I do believe there was an artist trapped inside you, Judy Dear. If you’d only been born fifty years later, you might have ditched the lonely part. And that would’ve made for a very different novel. Empowered. Compelling. A tad racy, perhaps. The Passion of Judith Hearne.”