Autumn Chickens
The Online Magazine for Forward Thinking People in Mid-Life and Beyond
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In this fascinating exploration of female characters in fiction, novelist and story-writer, Bronwen Griffiths discusses how 'older' women are featured in books...
Books featuring Older Women
Evil step-mothers, vile witches and jealous queens - older women, especially spinsters, have never had a good press.
The label ‘spinster’ or ‘old maid’ was, (and sometimes still is) used for women who failed to lived up to the ideal of separate male and female spheres. Without marriage or children these women had no home to run and no children to care for and were considered to be outside the social norms. But there were advantages. Once a woman was labelled an ‘old maid’ (too old for marriage and children) they were more able to life as they wished.
In the 19th century the novel as a form of writing takes off and a number of sympathetic middle-aged and older women appear in fiction and, in the twentieth century, as women’s roles change in society, writers reflect these transformations. However, even today, older women do not frequently feature as the main character in novels although that too is beginning to change as demographics shift in the West.
Baba Iagà by Ivan Bilibin (1902)
Here are some of my favourite older characters in fiction.
Villette, Charlotte Bronte, 1853 – Lucy Stowe
Narrated by the main character, Lucy Snowe, as an old woman, the story follows Lucy’s difficult life. Lucy has no family of any kind and has to make her own way in France. Although she does fall in love, her work in the school is of utmost important and she remains unmarried throughout the book.
Felix Holt, George Eliot, 1866 – Mrs. Transome
George Eliot brings us the character of Mrs. Transome, a woman ‘between fifty or sixty’ who has spent her life trying to achieve power through youthful guile, marriage, and motherhood. In her youth, Mrs. Transome was considered to be a notable beauty and wit, and she married a wealthy, landed older husband. Due to her husband’s senility she has been managing the estate. However, things do not work out so well for Mrs. Transome - when her son Harold returns, he declares that his mother has had to ‘worry [her]self about with things that don’t properly belong to a woman’. With him back she will have nothing to do but be a grandmother to Harry. Despite Mrs. Transome’s rejection of this role, Harold sees his mother as physically limited in her ability to help beyond managing her grandson. Mrs. Transome is ultimately a tragic character, but also one of the greatest literary statements on the condition of women.
Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf, 1925 – Clarissa Dalloway
Woolf writes about a single June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway - a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first representation of what she described as the ‘luminous envelope’ of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s interior consciousness. Clarissa fears loneliness and old age and yet she also questions the roles she has played in her life. The death of the young man allows her to see her life with real clarity.
It is interesting to see how Mrs. Dalloway is depicted on book covers. Sometimes she is relatively young and elegant, here – on this Penguin edition, she is faceless and asleep.
The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie, 1930 – Miss Marple
The famous Miss Marple first appears in 1930, in The Murder at the Vicarage and she both personifies but subverts the ‘old maid’ English spinster. Living in a stereotypical English village, she is always courteous, always careful to observe the proprieties, always ready with a cup of tea. But she is also acutely observant, solves crimes, and has ‘a mind like a meat cleaver.’
The Summer Book, Tove Jansson, 1972 – The Grandmother
An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter spend a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. The two slowly learn to adjust to each other’s fears, whims and yearnings for independence, and a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the nature of the island itself. It is a novel that celebrates both freedom and interdependence, and a novel I return to over and over again.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery, 2006 – Renee, the Concierge
Renee has been the concierge of an elegant building in the centre of Paris for twenty-seven years. She is short, ugly and argumentative, but she is also a lover and student of art, philosophy, music and Japanese culture, although she hides this from everyone she knows. Paloma is a smart twelve year old who has decided that she will end her life on her thirteenth birthday. Both Paloma and Renée hide their true talents and from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them, and they become friends. Despite the tragic end, a thread of humour and self-deprecation also run through this enjoyable novel.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, 2009 – Janina Duszejko
Eccentric, warm-hearted, scholarly and rude, Janina is convinced she knows why dead bodies keep turning up around her village in Poland and rages that ‘for people my age the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there.’ Both thriller and eco-fable, the novel is illuminated by her blazing rage. Throughout the novel Janina stands up for what she believes in, taking on her neighbours and haranguing the police and bureaucrats. She is character who lingers in the head long after you have finished reading.
Elizabeth Is Missing, Emma Healey, 2014 - Maud
Even though Maud is old and forgetful, she is certain that her friend Elizabeth has gone missing – and she puts up a fight to find out what’s happened to her. This warm and uplifting story captures the comedy, anxiety, and sheer terror of finding out you and your friends are old, and no one will listen to you. A sympathetic and moving portrait of dementia.
The photo shows Glenda Jackson in the role of Maud in the film of 2019.
An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, 2014 – Aaliya
Aaliya, the ‘unnecessary woman’ of the title, narrates her story in the winter of her 72nd year, as she contemplates which book she should translate next - her job is as a translator of literature. She has been long divorced and lives alone in a large apartment in Beirut, where she has stayed all her adult life, through the madness of the civil war and beyond.
Aaliya herself is a single woman in a culture where ‘Feminism … hasn’t reached espadrilles or running shoes yet; sensible heels are where it’s at (and) the choice not to marry hasn’t entered the picture.’
The Door, Magda Szabo, 1997 - Magda
The narrator of the story is Magda, in her old age, remembering the decades-long relationship she had with her housekeeper Emerence. Magda is a young writer in need of a housekeeper so that she and her academic husband can work but she is taken aback by Emerence’s stark manner. The old woman’s insistence on privacy (her door is always shut to everyone in the village) as well as her occasional jaw-dropping ruthlessness are disturbing also. But Magda bears witness to Emerence’s devotion to the village. And so, like Magda, we, the readers, worry for Emerance, especially as parts of her past bleed into the present of the story.
Magda Szabo c. Bodo Gabor/Telegraph
Stone in a Landslide, Maria Barbal, 2010 - Conxa
In this novella, Conxa looks back on a life torn apart by the Spanish Civil War. Conxa’s life has been a hard one. She is sent to relatives at a very young age to help look after their small farm, she marries young, works non-stop all her life, and loses her husband in a particularly brutal way. This is a novel which explores what it means to live a long life and the lingering effects of the past.
My novel, A Bird in the House, (2014) features Betty, an older woman and recent widow. When looking after her great-niece she comes across a young boy trespassing in her garden. The boy is the son of an asylum seeker from Libya. Betty becomes friendly with Ahmed’s father and she cares for Ahmed when his father returns to Libya to search for his missing daughter - Ahmed’s older sister. Betty spent time in Libya as a young woman and in the novel she looks back on her life, as she begins to live a new one.
I have written several pieces about older women in my flash fiction.
This piece was featured in Worthing Flash, November 2018:
She wanders the fields where the elms once stood. Nothing stands there now, only the winter grass and a cold wind barrelling down the hill to the broken willow. Close to the edge of the stream, she dives into her coat pocket coat for the seeds and crumbs she keeps. She will wait for them to arrive; their fluttering wings matching the fluttering in her heart. No one knows she comes down here, day after day. Especially when the snows come, especially then. She won’t worry. Her feet have trodden these paths for eighty years – they belong to her now. Like the fox that passes each evening, they inhabit her dreams.
In their own ways, despite life’s difficulties, and the particular difficulty of old age – ailing bodies, ailing minds – the women in these novels live out the last years of their lives with strength and dignity, and, although fictionalised, remind us all that there is possibility, hope and strength to be had in our older years.
You can read more of Bronwen's work at:
A Bird in the House is available for sale on Amazon - in paperback or Kindle
