Old women do not get a good press in literature. In fairytales and novels, age in women is typically equated with malevolence, weakness or madness. Even when beauty and strength are unnaturally preserved for thousands of years, as in H Rider Haggard’s classic adventure She, old women tend to be wicked.
In a year when the power of older women is finally being celebrated in Victoria Smith’s magnificent nonfiction book Hags, and when many older women remain active, well-educated and more financially independent than many of their grandchildren, where are the older literary heroines who, as in Jenny Joseph’s famous poem, Warning, “wear purple”? Today’s women of 80-plus are not Miss Havisham. Their generation danced to the Rolling Stones, travel widely, have careers and even, like Martha Stewart, wear bikinis.
