for the heist. In It's a Wonderful Life (1946), George Bailey sees the consequences of a world in which he never existed, one of which is that his wife Mary would have become an "old maid" librarian. The film presents this as a tragic outcome, but modern viewers have noted that the spinster version of Mary—portrayed as independent, gainfully employed, & surrounded by books—is hardly living an unfulfilling life. Literature In both The Taming of the Shrew (early 1590s) and Much Ado About Nothing (late 1590s), William Shakespeare referred to a contemporary saying that it was the fate of women who died unmarried to lead apes into hell. The word thornbacks was used to refer to old maids in Peter Anthony Motteux's 1694 English translation of François Rabelais' 16th century novels Gargantua and Pantagruel. In one of the earliest examples of autobiographical writing in English, John Dunton wrote in 1705 that unmarried women in Boston were called thornbacks at the age of thirty. A thornback (Raja clavata) is a commonly eaten species of ray fish, the female young of which were called maids, and in Scotland maiden-skates. The books Washington Square and The Heiress have old maid heroines who ultimately choose to remain spinsters and embrace the freedom of not having to enter marriage. One stereotype of spinsters that appears in literature is that they are downtrodden or spineless women who were victims of an oppressive parent. This stereotype is played out in William Faulkner's classic short story "A Rose for Emily" (1930), in which Emily's father is confident that no man is worthy of his daughter's hand in marriage. Other stereotypes include women who were relegated to lifetime roles as family caretaker for their family of origin or for a married sibling's children, "poor relations" who would work "to earn their keep" as nannies or unpaid domestics. For example, being a governess was the fate expected by the rejected titular orphan in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847); Eyre retained that status until the man she loved was widowed and available. A common theme in the fiction writings of author/poet Sandra Cisneros is marital disillusionment; for example. in the poem "Old Maids" (1994). In the Charles Dickens' classic Great Expectations, the primary antagonist is Miss Havisham, a spinster embittered by being defrauded and abandoned on her wedding day; an event that shaped the rest of her life, and by