Grand Finales

One of our most formidable literary critics explores how nine women artists flourished creatively in their final acts.

In 2008, academic and scholar Susan Gubar was told by a trusted oncologist that she had only a few years left to live. Though she outlived that dire prognosis, this brush with mortality refocused her attention on the boons of a longevity she did not expect to experience. She began to think: In the last years of our lives, can we shape and change our creative capabilities?

The resulting volume, Grand Finales, answers this question with a resounding yes. Despite the losses generally associated with aging, quite a few writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers have managed to extend and repurpose their creative energies. Gubar spotlights very creative old ladies: writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers from the past and in our times.

Each of Grand Finales’ nine riveting chapters features women artists—George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Lou Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Katherine Dunham—who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. Gubar draws on their late lives and works to suggest that seniority can become a time of reinvention and renewal. With pizzazz, bravado, and geezer machismo, she counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities, and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age.