How to Stop the Villain From Going Crazy
Lol! Sorry author, unmarried women didn't just disappear from the world after the age of 20 😂😂😂
I'm not in any way an expert at the marriage statistics in... Late 1800s New Orleans? But I am 100% certain that there were unmarried women above the age of 20 who would still move in society. In Jane Austen's England you weren't a spinster until around 30, I can't think New Orleans was completely different... okay no I'm looking this up:
Although studies are few and subject to possible biases, most scholars agree that the ready availability of inexpensive land in colonial America made marriage feasible at an early age. As a result, marriages occurred several years earlier, on average, in colonial America than in Europe, and much higher proportions of the population eventually married. Community-based studies suggest an average age at marriage of about 20 years for women in the early colonial period and about 26 for men. As population densities increased and land prices rose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American couples delayed marriage, and a higher proportion remained permanently unmarried. The published census figures for 1890, which are the earliest that permit estimates of age at marriage, reveal that the mean age at marriage was 23.8 for white women and 27.8 for white men—little different from those ages in England. (source)
Sorry author, you've fallen for one of the classic blunders. Most women didn't marry as teenagers in the past, at least in Europe and later North America.
Edit: Erik just did math, the novel is set in 1888.













