When I think of the Office for National Statistics (as I do almost daily), I imagine it as a kind of national village pump: a positive fountain of intriguing bits of gossip about the behind-curtains lives of our island populace.The latest bit of ONT goss concerns the marital entanglements of the female population between 25 and 44. Go on, do tell. Ooh I shouldn't, but here goes. Apparently we've gone cold on the idea of marriage in a big way. Well, biggish. Eight per cent of females between 25 and 44 (says the ONT) live alone. Which means that the other 92 per cent don't, and consequently that there is little cause for publicity-crazed bishops, Conservative MPs, officials of the Mothers' Union and other family-friendly types to become unduly alarmed.

Still, that figure of 8 per cent accounts for some 690,480 women, double the number of women living alone 20 years ago, when there were about 345,000 of them (us? With a son but no partner I occupy a debatable hinterland. I'm sure there is a special file for us somewhere in the great statistical Circumlocution Office...) And with marriage rates declining and the divorce rate rising, single-person households are predicted to account for 70 per cent of the growth in households over the next ten years.

By elegant coincidence, the ONT released its statistics in the week that Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson's sympathetic and scrupulously researched study of post-First World War spinsters was published in paperback. The Bridget Joneses of the postwar years filled the Establishment with foreboding. There were 1,750,000 of them, according to the 1921 Census, and they were collectively (and uncharmingly) known as The Surplus Women. Cartoons in Punch depicted them as pathetic gooseberries, awkwardly perched in their droopy knitwear between their luckier sisters who had contrived to snag a rare man, while The Strand Magazine's cartoonist depicted The Husband Hunters in full cry - a terrifying throng of voracious maenads in cloche hats pursuing a terrified lone male.

“Girls,” said the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls to her sixth form in 1917, “I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess ... it is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can.”

Times Archive, 1921: Leading article: Surplus women

None of the many facts from the census gives graver reason for thought that the huge disparity between the number of women and the number of men

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Here we come to the crucial difference between the single women of almost a century ago and those of today. The tragedy of war forced our great-aunts into a way of life that increasing numbers of their great-nieces willingly embrace. The real scandal of the ONT statistics is that a majority of female singletons report themselves happy with their spinster state. Even those headed for a (supposedly) lonely old age appear defiantly cheerful. A study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council found single women rating their own lives as happier and healthier than if they had cohabited (Ah, but how would they know?). Unmarried bliss was emphatically not the condition of most of Virginia Nicholson's single women. Her account is permeated with a terrible sense of incompleteness and low self-worth. The grim dinner at a Cambridge women's college described by Virginia Woolf - the plain gravy soup, the beef “suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market”, the curled and yellowing sprouts (in horrid contrast to the sprouts served at an expansive men's college dinner, which were “foliated as rosebuds but more succulent”) and the terrible pudding of prunes and custard - seems, in Nicholson's account, to be the pattern for generations of single girls' anhedonia.

Agnes Miall's enterprising Bachelor Girl's Guide to Everything of 1916 gives excellent advice on subjects from keeping accounts to fitting carpets, but stamps ruthlessly on any hint of douceur de vie, advising “soft art green and a dull brown” by way of decor, a store cupboard well stocked with plain biscuits and tins of sardines, and counselling earnestly against “artistic washstand china”. How different the life of the single friend with whom I recently had lunch at Harvey Nichols's restaurant (that works canteen of the glamorous single girl), from which I trundled home on the Tube, trying hard not to envy my unencumbered friend her fabulous clothes, perfect grooming, amazing flat overlooking the park and deeply enviable new job abroad, which came garnished with language lessons, a weekly cocktail party at the British consulate and even (indispensable accessory for the power spinster) a rescue cat from the local cat charity.

I suppose the other great difference between 2008 and 1921 is that - thanks to the efforts of our courageous maiden aunts in inventing for themselves and us a world in which a single woman is an interesting thing to be - we have a choice. I read an interview recently in which the businesswoman Karren Brady described her husband as being like an extra child. There are women who feel that they would rather dispense with marriage altogether than sustain a partnership with a child in a pinstriped suit. “Love,” runs the concluding sentence of Singled Out, “was not everything in life”. Perhaps not at 20, 30, 40 or even 60. But what about when you're really old, and come to look back over a life filled with French manicures, imperious cats and perfectly co-ordinated soft furnishings? Is that enough to sustain the heart? I think the ONS had better start asking around.

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