the 27 club

You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge cake is to me. – Jane Austen

When I turned twenty-one, my mother made me a birthday card printed with a line from Jane Austen she had altered for the occasion: ‘It happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-one than she was ten years before.’ I am half-hoping she will reprise the theme this year and send me one with Marianne Dashwood’s morbid observation: ‘A woman of seven and twenty […] can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.’

I am fortunate enough not to move in circles that share Marianne’s view of single women after a certain age as passionless spinsters. For one thing, as I learned last year from a viral tweet by Sophia Benoit, spinster only covers unwed women between twenty-three and twenty-six, after which age the applicable term is thornback; a magnificent appellation that makes me feel like exactly the kind of formidable rough-scaled bog-witch I have always aspired to be. For the most part, I inhabit an echo chamber in which people aren’t viewed as worth less or worthless for being single, regardless of age.

Outside of my cosy social media cloister, it seems like not everyone is entirely thornback-positive. I have been warned by some articles that at twenty-seven, the threat of eternal singledom has begun its slow approach like the grim, southward march of winter in Game of Thrones. I read one piece encouragingly titled ‘9 Depressingly Real Reasons Why 27 Is Your Crisis Year’ in which four of the nine reasons were relationship-centred:

‘Everyone you know is getting engaged. Everyone you know is getting married. Almost everyone you know who is married, is pregnant. […] there’s something about the specific age of 27 that lends itself to just being drowned in marriage announcements no matter where you turn. It’s either college couples who have been together for 6+ years finally taking the plunge, or “real world” couples who met a few years ago and got super serious, super fast. Either way, it’s a single 27-year-old’s worst nightmare.’

‘If history has taught us anything, twenty-seven is a cursed year,’ was another take I read: ‘Just look at Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. So it should come as no surprise that twenty-seven is a shitty year for singles too.’ Thrilled to be entering the phase of my life at which ‘being single’ is seen as comparable to ‘dying tragically young from heroin overdose.’ Austen’s Charlotte Lucas commits herself to pompous buffoon Mr Collins in exchange for domestic security at the age of twenty-seven; how many people nowadays are making the same kind of compromises because of this garbage culture that says we can’t be happy alone? I firmly believe that unless you are, like Charlotte, the impoverished daughter of a nineteenth-century former tradesman who cannot afford to dower you generously, there is absolutely no reason you ought to settle for someone ill-suited to you, whatever age you are, whatever kind of levelling-up or settling down you think you *should* be doing.

Reading Pride and Prejudice as a teenager was, for me, the beginning of a lifelong love affair – just not with Mr Darcy. (Or, for that matter, Elizabeth Bennet, though I’m sure we can all agree she’s a stone cold ride.) I fell in love with Jane Austen. I felt a warm, easy intimacy with her wry narrative voice that no writer had instilled in me before, and very few have since. I fell in love with her the way you fall in love with someone you meet and immediately, overwhelmingly, want to be your best friend. It was the way you fall in love with friends at university the first time you spend time with them outside of a seminar room, when someone’s casually suggested a drink after class and then half an hour later you’re talking about Geordie Shore instead of George Eliot and UTIs instead of Ulysses. It was the kind of buzz that has you clasping your best friend’s hand after several white wines and announcing you – you just get me, you know what I mean?

This year I turn the same age as Austen’s oldest heroine, Anne Elliot, and I don’t expect a lengthy WhatsApp missive from an ardent lover telling me I pierce their soul anytime soon; but those feelings of affection, admiration, understanding, and love, are what I feel for my closest and dearest friends. In Dolly Alderton’s popular memoir Everything I Know About Love, she writes about her best friend of twenty years and reflects that ‘I’d only fallen more and more in love with her the older we grew and the more experiences we shared […] Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realizing.’ My love stories have been the ones that happen offstage in Jane Austen novels. Friends dressing for balls while they all complain of nipple chafing from their best muslin. Friends swinging each other round the dancefloor to a Henry Purcell jig because oh my god, it’s our song!! Friends wingmanning friends by making socially advantageous introductions to eligible potential matches. Friends forming a human yurt to hide Harriet because her ex is here with his newly-betrothed and she’s drunk and crying on the floor. Friends having a shared existential crisis in the back of the carriage home at the end of the night.

I think we often mistakenly believe there is a hierarchy of love that ranks romantic partners as the holy grail of human connection, a nirvana to which all other relationships are secondary. Romantic love can be fulfilling and wonderful and I do not think for one second that it is wrong to have it, or wrong to want it. But what I feel for my friends is something fierce and enduring and extraordinary, and if I move through life advancing from thornback to moon-harpy or blood-crone or supreme necromancer of the wasteland, it will still be a love story. Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra in 1813, almost thirty-eight and never to marry, observing that such a life had its benefits during social gatherings: ‘I am put on the sofa near the fire, and can drink as much wine as I like.’ I won’t lie, that sounds like a very sweet deal; even more so when you have the sort of friends who will be by the fire drinking wine with you.

Cover photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

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