Singlehood and class crossings in Dorothy Richardson’s 1905 The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl

As a literary approach to singles studies, this essay proposes that scholars consider the ways in which reading desires shape our fields of research. In particular, it argues for the importance of the single texts we resist reading. The essay turns to Dorothy Richardson’s 1905 The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl as Told by Herself to ask what problematic texts might offer the field. Richardson concealed her undercover journalism and yoked slim labour experience to borrowed, fictionalized, and recycled material. The resulting text, which she published as an anonymous autobiography, refuses to grapple with the complicated stakes of its class passing. The Long Day portrays the intersecting worlds of single professional and labouring women who meet in modern public and domestic spaces. Richardson documents structural barriers to single stability and housing and also indulges class insecurities that frustrate rather than advance single community. While the text offers few solidarities or empathies; its pages create a clear portrait of single middle-class anxieties about downward mobility, class identity, and proximity to poverty and labour. Singlehood studies is stronger for engaging texts and perspectives that we do – and do not – want to read.