I followed a 1930s guide for women living alone – it’s changed my life ...Middle East

I have lived by myself for the last 12 years, and although I am well aware of the sympathetic head cock this can provoke in some people, my experience of solo living has been nothing short of fabulous.

I love being alone and am honestly not sure if I could ever share my space with another mouth-breathing human again, but, having said that, there is no denying that this is a lifestyle that comes with its own set of challenges. It’s damned expensive, for one thing, and you will need to learn how to deal with spiders, unopenable jars, and being sick all my yourself, for another. It can also get lonely from time to time.

Then there is the stigma round being a single, childless woman, living alone, and the fact that people will insist on feeling sorry for you, no matter the state of their own personal lives. It’s infuriating.

I have enormous admiration for any woman that has walked this path before me and am always happy to swap stories and share tips. So, imagine my excitement when I recently discovered a book from 1936 in my local charity shop, titled Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman, by one of the original “female bachelors”, Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971).

Because the number of single women living alone is now at a record high, it is very easy to believe we are the first generation to do this, but that isn’t true, not by a longshot. And in celebration of all the “extra women” who have gone before me and left notes, I decided to follow Hillis’s advice to the letter for one week to see if I could learn anything new about solo life, and to see how much the experience of women living alone has changed in the last 89 years.

Marjorie Hillis was an American author who worked as an editor at Vogue in New York. She was 47 and still single when she wrote the book, having lived by herself in Manhattan’s stylish Tudor City complex since she was 29. This should give you an idea of how dated some of the advice is going to be. The idea that a twenty-something could afford to live alone in central New York is just a fantasy in 2025. However, I wasn’t going to let that put me off. “Lay it on me, Marjorie,” I thought.

Live Alone and Like It was a huge success in 1936: it was number eight on the non-fiction best seller list that year, and you can understand why. Hillis wrote this at a critical point in history: not only were population numbers still struggling to recover from the First World War, meaning there were fewer men to go around, but women were entering the workforce and earning their own money on a scale never seen before. All this meant that, for one reason or another, a lot of women were living alone for the very first time.

The very first thing that Hillis addresses is attitude. Living alone is not for the faint hearted (especially in 1936) and feeling sorry for yourself will be of no help whatsoever. “Everybody feels sorry for herself (to say nothing of himself) now and then,” she writes. “But anyone who pities herself for more than a month on end is a weak sister and likely to become a public nuisance besides.” I find that if you imagine her talking to you in a transatlantic accent, with one eyebrow raised, it’s the most fun.

Here, Hillis and I are perfectly aligned, though I wouldn’t have put it quite so harshly. However you have ended up living alone, be that “death, divorce, or some rearrangement of relationships”, if you give into self-pity and expect others to jump in and rescue you from yourself, “not only will you soon actually be all alone; you will be an outstanding example of the superbore”. Spot on.

When it comes to the dreaded stigma that inevitably comes with being what Hillis calls a “one-woman ménage”, her advice is simple: “Defiance is not a bad quality to have handy.” By which she means, don’t put yourself in a position where anyone would dare to feel sorry for you. Arrange your own life, exactly as you like it, be bold, forge friendships, have hobbies, and go on adventures.

square KATE LISTER

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One of Hillis’s key arguments is to be proactive in your social life. Don’t wait silently for an invitation to this or that and then sulk because you’re on your tod, get out there and do it yourself, goddamnit. I confess, I am not as good at this as I could be, so I spent last week setting up various social meet-ups with people I haven’t seen for a while. Watching my diary fill up felt pretty good. I met old friends for lunch, attended an open mic poetry night, and briefly considered joining a running club, but decided that I’d rather die alone than go – but the point is, I did sociable things.

Reading through Hillis’s book, I couldn’t help but think I would have been just fine in 1936, and then she hit me with it: “There is no reason why the woman who lives alone should look any different from the woman who doesn’t, and every reason why she shouldn’t.” She continued: “The notion that it ‘doesn’t matter because nobody sees you’, with dull meals and dispirited clothes that follow in its wake, has done more damage than all the floods of springtime.” Looking down at my tea-stained onesie and the open bag of bread I’d been picking at like a deranged duck, I knew I had failed this test.

When you live alone, you can get away with all manner of very slovenly behaviour precisely because “nobody will see you”. I confess, I have been guilty of eating breakfast cereal as my main meal for weeks on end, and of wearing old Halloween outfits around the house because I couldn’t be bothered to do any laundry. Hillis would have been appalled.

She urges solo livers to indulge themselves as they would do a romantic partner. Take all that energy and give it back to yourself. Cook yourself nice meals, serve them on fancy plates, and spoil yourself with “cold cream sessions”. Fix your hair and your nails. Buy yourself flowers, and make sure you have “a trim little cotton frock that flatters you on an odd morning when you decide to be violently domestic”. In other words, maintain your standards and care for yourself as you would a partner.

Inspired by Hillis’s words, I spent my week doing exactly that. Even if I knew nobody would see me, I got dressed properly, did my hair and my make-up, and every evening I made sure I had something nice to eat. I even served it to myself on a tray. I actually bought some old school cold cream and slathered my face in it, while lazing around in the bath each night, reading “a spicy book”. I really did buy myself flowers.

This was the hardest part of my experiment and proved to be the one I enjoyed the most. Yes, it was a huge effort to make and serve myself three loving meals a day, but I have to say, I actually started to look forward to what I was going to eat. Even as I type this article, I have a little plate of tasty snacks next to me. The irony of this is that countless women are out there prepping and cooking meals for entire families, but aren’t caring for themselves. Here I was with no one to cook for and still not caring for myself properly. I will absolutely maintain the effort involved to cook for myself as if I was cooking for someone else.

Her advice on booking yourself into a private hospital when you’re feeling sick, rather than dealing with it at home, felt less useful and rather on the dramatic side. Likewise, her suggestion that taking up palmistry is a great way to be an interesting party guest is very much a take-it-or-leave-it affair.

square KATE LISTER

I’ve been single for so long, I don’t think I can be in a relationship again

I don’t know if I will keep up with the daily fashion parade but slugging my face in cold cream every evening has been a revelation. I’m definitely keeping that up. This was self-care on an epic level.

I confess, the levels of energy required were considerable, but Marjorie was quite right: if I wasn’t going do it for myself, no one else was. As she observed, “you can, in fact, indulge yourself unblushingly – an engaging procedure which few women alone are smart enough to follow. Being Spartan becomes pointless when there is no one to watch your performance”.

I was surprised by just how progressive Hillis’s book was. Of course, some of the advice is dated. For example, I don’t need to learn about buying alcohol as a single woman because the neighbours might think of me as “a woman with an affliction, like insanity or epilepsy”. Her advice on dating is fairly succinct too, “whatever you decide, you’ll think you regret it. You’ll hate the shabby end of romance, and you’ll detest missing it all together”.

But, her advice on self-care, the right attitude, and maintaining one’s standards have actually proved very useful and certainly worth remembering. I intend to be “violently domestic” in a nice frock far more from now on.

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