The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction

Literary scholar Ruth O. Saxton reads across thirty works of fiction — from Barbara Pym and Doris Lessing to May Sarton, Margaret Drabble, and Jenny Diski — to ask how novelists imagine women in the last decades of life. She traces the difference between the diminished old lady of cultural stereotype and the vivid, still-becoming women some writers dare to portray. A perceptive, companionable guide to finding yourself on the page at any age.