Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Nelson Page

A “remarkable woman” offered with one hand and snatched away with the other: Page’s line is a compliment engineered to collapse. The hinge is “if.” It doesn’t merely qualify praise; it makes “old maid” a veto stamp that cancels every other attribute. The sentence performs a social verdict in miniature, treating unmarried status not as biography but as a moral condition that contaminates the whole person.

Page, writing in a postbellum Southern literary culture that prized “ladyhood” as both aesthetic and social glue, taps a familiar stereotype: the unmarried woman as embittered, odd, excessive, somehow out of season. The jab works because it is framed as reasonable assessment, not cruelty. It invites the listener to nod along, as if the world’s categories are self-evident: remarkable is allowable, but only inside the sanctioned arc of wifehood and motherhood. Outside that arc, female distinction becomes suspicious - a sign of failure rather than talent.

The subtext is less about the woman than about a community policing its boundaries. “Old maid” functions as a warning label, a way to domesticate female autonomy by turning it into a punchline. The rhythm matters: “very remarkable” raises expectation, then the final phrase delivers the social punch, letting the speaker keep the posture of fairness while enforcing a hierarchy. It’s a small sentence with a large appetite: it consumes accomplishment and leaves only marital status standing.