Patricia Brent - Spinster

A single girl, goaded by her fellow boarding-house residents, pretends to be engaged to a charming officer.

‘Patricia Brent, Spinster’ was a wildly popular light romantic novel by Herbert George Jenkins in 1918, which was immediately optioned for adaptation as a film in the depressing aftermath of the Great War. Set in a Bloomsbury boarding house, it tells the story of Patricia, secretary to a ‘rising’ politician who overhears herself pitied for her single state by the meddling older residents. Incensed, the spirited Patricia pretends to be dining with an invented fiancé at the Quadrant club. Having been followed there by her nosey neighbours she randomly selects an officer on his own at a table and asks him to play along; he does so charmingly and the rest of the story follows the complications of their relationship.

The adaptation was by Eliot Stannard and it was directed by Geoffrey Malins of Battle of the Somme (1916) fame. The print is missing the first reel which sets up the characters in the boarding house but the story is otherwise complete. The final denouement gallops through a Zeppelin air raid tinted a satanic red.