Margaret Drabble : The Dark Flood Rises

Margaret Drabble has been described as a writer who has ‘achieved a panoramic vision of contemporary life’. She has written women’s lives from student days in The Summer Birdcage through motherhood in The Millstone and falling out with children in The Witch of Exmoor. She has also written biography and memoir and now in The Dark Flood Rises she turns her vision to old age and the approach of death. Her title is taken from a poem by D H Lawrence The Ship of Death,

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

Stella Gibbons : Starlight

Stella Gibbons will always be best known for her first book, Cold Comfort Farm, published in 1932, winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse prize and described by the Sunday Times as ‘very probably the funniest book ever written’. I read it as a teenager and periodically reread it, but for a long time I had no idea that Stella Gibbons had written at least twenty-nine other novels. Thanks are due to the Dean Street press who have a project of republishing novels by writers like Margery Sharp and Stella Gibbons who were very aware of the class system of their time and not afraid to have characters who are old, irascible or working class (often all three).

Stella Gibbons : The Woods in Winter

This is the third book in my ‘women alone’ reading journey, but like most things, it did not turn out to be exactly as I expected.

Angela Carter : Wise Children

Angela Carter pulled the stops out with this, her last book. As if she wanted to show her humour, her erudition, and her dazzling writing skills all in one book. Written in the voice of Dora Chance we have a history of England, a history of music hall, theatre, and film and an account of the life of people in the same family born on either side of the class divide. And don’t forget the Shakespeare, for the whole book in each of its five section has riffs on many Shakespeare plays; Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Othello, A Midsummer’ Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice and at least twelve more. The title of course comes from The Merchant of Venice where Launcelot says, ‘It’s a wise father that knows his own child’, which is Shakespeare’s twist on Homer’s line in the Odyssey where Telemachus says, ‘My Mother tells me I am son to Ulysses, but it is a wise child that knows his own father.’

Readers Live Longer than Non-readers

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One of our correspondents who has her finger on the pulse of the latest research (thank you Teri) has sent us a link to a recent study published in the Journal of Social Science and Medicine that seems to indicate readers live significantly longer than non-readers.

Helen Garner : Everywhere I Look

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We gave each other gifts this New Year, the reading women in my family. And because we all have an embrasse of books, we committed to giving each other a book we had already owned and read. I scored four widely different books; The Travellers by Regina Porter, Australian Short Stories No. 23, What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt and Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner.

Yell, Sam, If You Still Can : Maylis Besserie

Oh no, I hear you cry, not another book about someone ending their days in an aged care home?

Yes, I’m afraid so, but the subject in this case is the last days of Samuel Beckett. Not your usual old age pensioner. A man whose  Nobel prize was awarded for novels and drama in which, ‘ the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’ and who takes a fairly dark view of himself and his life.

Olive, Again : Elizabeth Strout

I only read Olive Kitteridge earlier this year and had to allow a little time to pass before I read the next book where she is the protagonist, Olive, Again; for Olive is strong meat, and here she is tackling old age head on.

Women Growing Old

April is my birthday month and as T. S Eliot says

April is the cruellest month,

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,

Mixing memory and desire….

I can’t add, as he does, ‘stirring dull roots with spring rain’, because April is autumn here and the leaves are falling, but whenever these anniversaries occur, I tend to reflect on my life. How many more birthdays will I see, how long will I remain strong and energetic? It is useful to think upon these matters, for, as Marcus Aurelius said, ‘We are all creatures of a day.’ It was for this reason I took on my self-appointed task for this month; reading inspiring books by or about old women. Could I learn something that would assist me to grow older with wisdom?