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Virginia Nicholson answers questions from the St Mawgan's Reading Group, based in Cornwall, and one of the Shortlisted groups from our 2007 Readers’ Group Prize.

Q: Are you tempted to expand some of the individual stories and write a novel?

A: I’m flattered that the St Mawgan group think I should write a novel, but I’m afraid they’d better not hold their breath for one. I come from a research background; before I took up writing I worked in TV documentaries, and everything I do is rooted in fact. Although I love telling the stories of real people, I am in awe of imaginative writers who can use facts as a springboard for novels, and who feel uninhibited enough to invent and create worlds.

Q: What made you want to write about this particular period of our history – did you have relatives in the situations you researched?

A: I had already written a book about subcultures in the first half of the 20th Century (Among the Bohemians – Experiments in Living 1900-1939, Viking 2002) so when I was looking for a new subject I decided to stay with a period with which I had become very familiar. I also knew that I would be able to find women still alive (though not many…) who would talk to me. This is the kind of history one can reach out and touch, because it is still within living memory. No, none of my own relatives were ‘Surplus women’, but my mother had an older friend, a very clever zoologist, who was one of them, and her Spartan existence in a basement flat summed up the word ‘spinster’ for me. Our neighbour in Leeds, Miss Pease, was another… and so many of my schoolteachers were ‘on the shelf’. As a schoolgirl I was, along with my classmates, probably quite cruel about these single ladies in their tweed suits, but now I just admire them so much. They had so much to contend with, and I hope ‘Singled Out’ is in some sense a tribute to them.

Q: How long did it take, and how did you manage to collate all the information and then set about writing the chapters which manage to flow with insight and understanding whilst incorporating a mixture of historical and literacy references?

A: I spent over three years researching ‘Singled Out’. I rely on my instinct when it comes to material, and I knew that I had always to keep in mind that the tale I was telling was a very emotional one. So that guided me during all my work in libraries and archives. Collating the information requires a lot of patient slog, but computers do help (though I always keep paper copies of everything). I type concise notes on all my material, and paste it into cross-referenced files, so, for example, my ‘Singled Out’ research files include such topics as ‘Loneliness’, ‘Lesbianism’, ‘the Image of the Spinster’, ‘Economic survival’ etc. When it comes to marshalling all this information into a book, it then helps me to have an overall chapter plan – almost a ‘story’ – so that each snippet of information finds its natural place in the narrative. The narrative of ‘Singled Out’ follows an arc from loss and despair, through to final triumph and vindication – which is why I think many people felt (as the St Mawgan’s Book Group obviously does) that the picture is one of ultimate fulfillment. That is not to say that this kind of ‘multi-biography’ is easy. It’s not

Q: Do you feel that you covered the whole spectrum of people, especially the working class women?

A: The phenomenon of the ‘Surplus Woman’ cut right across society, and I certainly did my best to represent the full social spectrum. I certainly did not want only to tell the story of a number of privileged upper-class ladies. But it’s not always easy to find material by or about people who are less articulate than the memoir-writers and journalists of the educated classes. I was quite lucky however: I found a marvellous archive full of unpublished ‘Working-class Autobiographies’, which I drew on quite substantially. I also used material from the problem pages of magazines addressed to servants and factory workers, talked to elderly working-class ladies now living in residential care homes, and put advertisements in magazines. The Marie Stopes archive has an amazingly huge dossier of material relating to people’s sex lives – of all classes – from the 1920s and 30s. And I referred to contemporary social surveys. There is stuff out there if you look for it.

Q: In your opinion, what do you consider the most important change in society brought about by the lives of the Surplus Women?

A: I believe that the emergence of women is probably the most significant social change of the 20th Century. The process had already begun long before the First World War (in fact, the war slowed it down in some ways, because the suffrage movement suspended its campaign from 1914-18). But when, following the wholesale slaughter of ¾ million men, the ‘surplus women’ flooded the market (so to speak), their very existence re-invigorated the nascent feminist movement. You only have to look at the extraordinary achievements – in so many fields – of those single women between the wars, and compare them with what their lives would have been like as stay-at-home wives and mothers, to appreciate how significant this was. But almost more than the high-achievers among them, I believe that it was perhaps the single women teachers who had the most important effect on society. These were the women who taught the 1970s feminists. They were extraordinary role models.