A small pink paperback book arrived recently, with a cover drawing of a lady (in the old-fashioned sense of that word) sitting up in bed in a pink dressing gown with fur trim and holding a martini glass. Title: “Live Alone and Like It” (Hatchette Book Group, $14). Subtitle: “The Classic Guide for the Single Woman.” Original publication date: 1936. It was written by then-Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis (1889-1971) and has a new introduction by Laurie Graff, whose contributions to contempo chick-lit include “You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs.”

I leafed through “Live Alone” expecting to find admonitions and advice that were dated and possibly offensive, therefore hilarious, and there was some of that. (Frank Crowninshield’s original intro advises the single lady to concentrate on “not talking about things she doesn’t understand to people who do, or about things she does to people who don’t” — yeah, good thing guys don’t ever do that — and “not wearing a backless gown when she has an over-vertebrate back” — words to live by.)
But there are also wonderful, funny drawings by Cipe Pineles, and I kept coming across sentences that created the atmosphere of sophisticated film comedies of the same vintage, like “The Awful Truth,” “The Lady Eve,” “His Gal Friday.”

For instance, Chapter 3, “When a Lady Needs a Friend,” begins with: “A reasonably large circle of friends and enemies whom you can see when you want to, and will often see when you don’t want to, is an important asset.” In Chapter 4, the question of how late a lone female should entertain a man is posed. The answer: “Ten-forty-five p.m. might seem scandalous to your Aunt Hattie, and three-thirty a.m. be disconcertingly early to the girl on the floor below.”

There are lots of quaint references to “becoming tea gowns” and “crossings to Europe” and collecting stamps, but often enough you come across a witheringly caustic and wicked remark that makes this book an intriguing reminder of the faint beginnings of 20th century feminism. (Hillis is described on the book jacket as “one of a growing number of independent, professional women who lived alone by choice.”)
The tone is meant to be sprightly and defiant. “The chances are that at some time in your life, possibly only now and then between husbands, you will find yourself settling down to a solitary existence,” it begins. But sometimes it just strikes you as sad that such an interesting and intelligent woman felt compelled to acknowledge that she and others like her were, essentially, viewed as pitiable or freakish: “The first (fact) is that — to put it baldly — an extra woman is a problem…. Extra women mean extra expense, extra dinner-parties, extra bridge opponents, and, all too often, extra sympathy.”
Writing in 2008, Laurie Graff seems to say that some improvements in the national mindset re: single females haven’t been institutionalized.  Graff recalls a conversation with a married male acquaintance, in Manhattan circa 2000, about her own situation — living alone with her dog. “Not even a roomate?” he asked her. “I live alone,” she assured him. “My, that’s very brave of you,” he said.