‘I knew I could be alone, but what if I gave myself permission to prefer it? What would that be like?’ GLYNNIS MACNICOL, author of No One Tells You This IN 1936, A WOMAN NAMED MARJORIE HILLIS wrote a book, a best seller in its time and republished in 2005, called Live Alone and Like It, a guide for the woman who, for whatever reason, finds herself going solo. Hillis, a career woman who did end up marrying, wasn’t saying that single life was for everyone. “But,” she wrote, “the chances are that at some time in your life, possibly only now and then between husbands, you will find yourself settling down to a solitary existence.”
The idea of a woman living on her own may have been more…