With old age comes new stories
Ashenburg, known for her non-fiction, isn’t the only author to delve into fiction later in life
There’s a scene in my novel, “Sofie & Cecilia,” where a man proposes marriage to one of the heroines. Of course, I knew that the character in question was past middle age, but she was vital and attractive, and I hadn’t done the math. Late in the writing, I finally subtracted the year of her birth from the year of the proposal, and realized to my horror that she was then 70. For a few panicked minutes, I tried to adjust her age downwards, but by that stage too much in the book would have had to be changed. So I thought, well, why not 70? After all, one of the main points of “Sofie & Cecilia” is the flowering of women in old age. The third and last part of the novel is called “Red” — for passion, for experimentation, for sunset, for the intensity with which the final part of life can be lived. In their 60s and 70s, Sofie and Cecilia find love and the serious work that has eluded them.
Like my heroines, I am trying new things in old age. My first novel has just been published and I am two months shy of my 73rd birthday. A septuagenarian making her debut as a novelist sounds singular, but I have plenty of company — some of the novelists I most admire didn’t begin writing until they were old. Probably not coincidentally, they are all women. Even now, the shape of a woman’s life often includes childrearing and child-supporting that demand most of her energies for decades. Delay can also come from the feelings of inadequacy that women confess to more than men.
The earliest of these late-blooming novelists is Ethel Wilson (1888-1980), a Vancouver writer who published her first novel, “Hetty Dorval,” when she was 59. To all appearances a conventional doctor’s wife, Wilson wrote fiction in her 60s and 70s that is unconventional, even subversive. In a typical Wilson novel, a woman picks up and leaves her life without a backward glance, amoral people thrive and compassionate people sometimes do more harm than good — all against gorgeously evoked British Columbia scenery.
Equally subversive but more lightweight, Mary Wesley (1912-2002) wrote 10 bestselling novels in her 70s and 80s. An upperclass English woman, Wesley had one great subject — sex and a few closely related themes, such as the importance of pleasure and the evils of hypocrisy. “Harnessing Peacocks,” about a woman who earns her living as a cook and a call girl, is a good place to start. Her scorn for bourgeois morality stretches to a tolerance for brothersister incest, but usually her nonchalance is less disturbing.
The greatest of this trio is Penelope Fitzgerald (1917-2000), one of the 20th century’s finest novelists. The settings of her nine novels, written in her 60s and 70s, range from an East Anglian bookstore (“The Bookshop”) to Italy in the 1950s (Innocence) to 18th-century Saxony (“The Blue Flower”). The constants are resourceful women, less resourceful men who are poleaxed by love, and a rueful, comic sense that things rarely go well in this world. Behind them is a sensibility like no one else’s.
The novels of these late-starters share distinctive qualities. They tend to be brief, because at this stage of life we know time is precious. They benefit from decades of watching and listening to people, as well as from the writers’ own experience. They are often bold (that steering wheel flying out the window again). Conventional plots are infrequent, as are conventional morals and social expectations.
There’s an “if-not-now-then-when?” spirit about these novelists that strikes a chord with me.
After writing four non-fiction books, that now-or-never feeling impelled me into fiction. In retrospect, I loved novels so much that for most of my life I couldn’t imagine daring to write one. Especially a novel like “Sofie & Cecilia,” set in Sweden, a country I do not know well, and inspired by its two most famous late-19th-century painters and their wives. But encouraged by Wilson, Wesley and Fitzgerald, I started a new chapter in life.
One thing I know for sure: I’m in good company.