After the slaughter of the trenches, the 1921 census revealed a female “surplus” of 1.75m. Nicholson explains how these women were faced with the stark reality of spinsterhood, childlessness and financial insecurity in a world where marriage was a woman's crowning achievement and men were overwhelmingly the breadwinners. She wants to connect us with these women, and she does so by telling wonderful stories. Gertrude Caton-Thompson's young love Carlyon was brutally killed in the Libyan desert and she never had eyes for another; the lesbian “Gordon” Holmes made a fortune as Britain's first woman stockbroker; Gertie Maclean, efficient and on the shelf, set up Universal Aunts - women willing to do anything from picking up children or helping organise a picnic to looking after a pet snake (who wouldn't want to employ Phyllis Beckett, who knew “all about ‘footer' and white mice”, and would “slide down banisters”). This is a riveting biography, full of great quotes (The Daily Mail urged the government to legislate against “too heavy a flow of foreign virgins into the country”). Nicholson doesn't engage with the fact that there was already a demographic imbalance before the war, or address the ways in which emancipation was under way by 1914, but to understand women's place in inter-war Britain you need many types of history. This intimate, sympathetic account is one of them, but the publisher should be kicked for packaging it to look like a wartime love story and cramming it with tiny print

Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson
Penguin £8.99. Buy the book £8.54 plus free delivery

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