During the Victorian period, thousands of women left England to seek work and new lives in the British colonies. The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration examines the highly problematic issues surrounding the colonial emigration of unmarried Victorian women, revealing the many ways in which they were regarded as cultural "excess." Rita S. Kranidis explains how England had little use for spinsters, a category applied to the working and middle classes, including domestic laborers, genteel women, and middle-class widows.