Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists

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. In Grand Finales, author Susan Gubar features women artists—George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mary Lou Williams, and Katherine Dunham—who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. She 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, Gubar counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities, and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age.