Miss Minns
The third of Hilda's circle: a clergyman's daughter of about thirty-eight, living on a tiny annuity, who is trying to develop her mind and is not sure how to start. Bowling calls her a sad case and means it.
To develop her mind, which is her own phrase. She talks vaguely about modern progress and the woman's movement and has no idea how to begin.
The book
At a glance
- The third of Hilda's circle in West Bletchley
- About thirty-eight
- A small annuity or fixed income
- A clergyman who sat on her heavily while he lived, by Bowling's reading of her
- Part II, chapter 10, and Part III, chapter 1
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMiss Minns is a tall thin woman of about thirty-eight with black patent-leather hair and a very good, trusting face. She lives on a small fixed income and is, Bowling thinks, a leftover from the old West Bletchley, back when it was a country town and not a suburb. It is written all over her that her father was a clergyman and sat on her heavily while he lived.
Bowling is harder on Mrs Wheeler than on her. His line about Miss Minns is that she is a special by-product of the middle classes, one of the women who turn into withered bags before they manage to escape from home, and that for all her wrinkles she still looks exactly like a child. Not going to church is still a tremendous adventure to her.
She is the only one of the three who ever tries to read a Left Book Club book, and the only one at the lecture whose discomfort Bowling can read from behind. He watches her sitting very upright with her head cocked on one side like a bird, working out whether this is improving her mind or not, and wishing she could make out what it was all about.
How the book draws them
- How she is drawnTall and thin, about thirty-eight, with black patent-leather hair and a good trusting face. Bowling says that for all her wrinkles she still looks exactly like a child.
- The pince-nezShe wears pince-nez, which slip down her nose when she has to hurry.
- Where she came fromA clergyman's daughter on a tiny annuity, and a leftover, Bowling guesses, from the little country town West Bletchley used to be before the suburb grew over it.
- Why she joined themHe thinks she attached herself to Hilda and Mrs Wheeler at the start out of pure loneliness, and that now they take her with them wherever they go.
- At the lectureIn the front row, very upright, head cocked to one side like a bird, while the speaker reads out German suicide statistics. You could tell from the look of her long thin neck, Bowling says, that she was not feeling happy.
- The one who triesShe certainly had a go at reading one or two of the Left Book Club books, which Bowling says would not even have occurred to the other two.