Older, Contented Women in Fiction

A WMST-L query for "novels that depict strong, single, independent, over 40,
childfree women who are satisfied with their lives" gave rise to the following
responses.  For more WMST-L files available on the Web, see the
WMST-L File Collection.

Hi,

I'm trying to track down some recommendations for novels that depict
strong, single, independent, over 40, childfree, women who are
satisfied with their lives.

Thank you in advance. 

Joan
Joan Starker, Ph.D.
jstarker  AT  teleport.com

Try Barbara Pym's Excellent Women (I believe the protagonist is over 40).
 
 
Dr. Jeana DelRosso
Chair, Department of English
Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
4701 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD  21210
jdelrosso  AT  ndm.edu
 

Not in the realm of great lit, but I really like Sara Paretsky's
detective series featuring V.I. Warshawsky.  I guess the protagonist is
under 40 at the beginning of the series, but definitely turns 40
somewhere along in there.

Laurie King's Folly should be on this list.  Couldn't put it down.

-- 
Dr. Sharon Collingwood
http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/collingwood7/

Department of Women's Studies
Ohio State University
286 University Hall
230 North Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1311

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It is interesting that the middle-aged single heroine shows up as detective
in mysteries (male detectives are also often single).  The isolation of the
detective is part of the territory.  In serious fiction, there is a real
dearth. Most fiction is about young people, and love/marriage is a big big
subject for novels. the pressure toward a wedding (or a divorce!) is
considerable. Anita Brookner has lots of single heroines but they are all
sad and out of it.  Barbara Pym has many single heroines but again, they
tend to lead  restricted mingy boiled-egg-for-dinner  lives. They would
definitely not inspire  students to think a woman can have a big fulfilling
life without a man!

There are wonderful strong midlife single-women characters throughout lit,
but they tend not to be the heroines. Trollope's Lily Dale and Madame Max (a
widow), Dicken's Betsy Trotwood.
I loved Gail Godwin's The Odd Woman, when I read it years ago --it has a
midlife single heroine, although she's not very happy.  And of course
there's George Gissing's The Odd Women.  In that book, single women in
genteel poverty find happiness by going to work, and the heroine, a
proto-feminist, ends up single when the man she loves decides he wants a
more conventional wife.
The point Gissing was trying to make with his title was that because of
demographics there were millions of women in Britain for whom there was no
realistic possibility of marriage-- they were "odd" in the sense of
"unpaired,' like odd numbers -- so society should stop judging women by the
marital yardstick and open up to single women.
If memory serves...
It's a wonderful book with lots to talk about with students.

Katha Pollitt
kpollitt  AT  thenation.com

Interesting reflections, Katha.  A single woman for life who's now in her
90s I think just published a book:
'Somewhere Towards the
End'<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/14/books/chapters/chapter-somewhere-towards-the-end.html?ref=firstchapters>
By
DIANA ATHILL

Perhaps "single" needs to be contextualized, as the initial question said
"strong, single, independent, over 40, childfree, women who are satisfied
with their lives."  That's a big combination of things.  "Who are satisfied
with their lives" could be questioned for anyone.  But it is a big
under-discussed feminist problem.  Each element can give as much grief as
satisfaction.  How do novels get written?  I bet a lot of women authors are
strong single and alone, but maybe not writing books about such characters.

Barrie Karp
NYC

 "strong, single, independent, over 40, childfree, women who are satisfied
with their lives."

Is the key ingredient "childfree"?

strong, single, independent, over 40, childfree, people who are satisfied
with their lives?

strong, single, independent, over 40, people who are satisfied with their
lives?

Barrie Karp

It's all of them, presumably. The point is that women of that type are
very rare in fiction (and movies and tv shows), much rarer than men of
that type, and that that is of course part of the cultural shaping of
women's roles - as Mill pointed out rather eloquently, however silly
James Fitzjames Stephen may have thought him. (Well, Mill didn't point
out the movies and tv part, to be sure.)

opheliabenson  AT  msn.com<mailto:opheliabenson  AT  msn.com> 

Thing is, novels have to have a story, which means conflict and drama and
change. the character who fits all these adjectives is not going to be easy
to lay a whole plot onto. Male, female, married, single, characters who are
satisfied with their lives don't make for great stories. Novels tend to be
about dissatisfied people, people with problems and troubles and hungers and
frustrations. They are the ones who quest, and make a story happen.
    This is why so many novels have young central characters.
A great novel about a  brilliant single woman, a poet and  scholar, is May
Sinclair's Mary Olivier. I love this novel, and wrote the intro for a new
edition (NYRB Press). She grows up in a suffocating victorian family and is
unable to break away in time to marry her great love (she sleeps with him
though, which was shocking at the time). But she does write important books
and comes to a kind of happiness in the end.
Are there novels about satisfied bachelors?

Katha Pollitt
kpollitt  AT  thenation.com

I second Katha Pollitt's endorsement of May Sinclair's _Mary Olivier_, a
novel that Virago Press (in the UK) reissued and revived nearly thirty years
ago and that has been in and out of print ever since. Equally impressive is
the short, spare, grim work of fiction that Sinclair wrote later, _The Life
and Death of Harriett Frean_ (1922), featuring the same sort of protagonist
with the same sort of family background. This time, however, Sinclair
revisited the heroine's choices and found them tragically misguided.
Undergraduates tend not to like this novel, as it offers no sugarcoating
and, as the title suggests, takes its heroine all the way to the unhappy end
of her life.

Margaret D. Stetz
Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and
Professor of Humanities
University of Delaware
Newark, DE
email: Stetzm  AT  udel.edu or Chavvy  AT  aol.com

"Thing is, novels have to have a story, which means conflict and drama
and change. the character who fits all these adjectives is not going
to be easy to lay a whole plot onto. Male, female, married, single,
characters who are satisfied with their lives don't make for great
stories. Novels tend to be about dissatisfied people, people with
problems and troubles and hungers and frustrations. They are the ones
who quest, and make a story happen."

Hmmm - how much of that is really inherent in story needs and how much
of it is just habit? Novels have always been like that therefore we
think they have to be like that? It seems to me that male, female,
married, single, characters who are satisfied with their lives can
then go on to be hungry for all sorts of other things, which would
actually be more interesting as a story than yet more girl meets boy
stuff. Novels could be less about coupling and more about work and
other sorts of quest.

opheliabenson  AT  msn.com

Katha's mention of Gissing's The Odd Women bought me back to the first
article I ever wrote: "Fictional Feminists in The Bostonians and The
Odd Women" (1972) in Images of Women in Fiction: Feminist
Perspectives.  Much of my subsequent writing during the seventies was
about the tension in fiction over work, politics and marriage for
women.
 
Nan
 
------
Dr. Nan Bauer-Maglin
Professor Emerita
The City University of New York
nbauer-maglin  AT  gc.cuny.edu <mailto:nbauer-maglin  AT  gc.cuny.edu> 
 

Lisa Appagninesi, Canadian by birth, but Londoner by choice or habit, wrote
a novel about a single and successful (in conventional terms) London writer,
entitled Kicking Fifty.  The sentiment of the novel is well-expressed by the
title.  Good luck in your search.
Jennifer

I think what Katha says maybe also helps to explain why where we *do*
see the characters as described is often in detective novels.  Such
stories aren't driven by the protagonist's inner dynamics.  Rather, the
plot is driven by the protagonist's struggle to figure out who done the
dirty deed.  This works just as well if the character is self-satisfied
as if s/he is in beset by conflicts.

I thought the name of May Sarton would quickly appear; certainly many of
her novels fit the bill. I would especially recommend The Education of
Harriet Hatfield and The Magnificent Spinster. --Temma

---------------------------------------
Temma Berg
Professor of English
Gettysburg College
tberg  AT  gettysburg.edu

If you want to expand to women's journals, you have many rich choices, May
Sarton being among the best.  There's also Gift from the Sea,  by Anne
Morrow Lindbergh, and An Unknown Woman, by Alice Koller.  For novels, I
would also recommend Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and A Country
Doctor, by Sarah Orne Jewett.  Also, keep in mind that there are extremely
interesting and vital middle aged and older women in the works of many black
women novelists.  I'm thinking of The Salteaters  by Toni Cade Bambara,
among many others.
Aimée Sands