‘I hope publishers will be brave’: older women are often erased in fiction – but in 2 new Australian novels they take centre stage

By Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

If older women move through the world with a sense of being unseen, in the world of books, and especially in contemporary fiction, they have all but been erased. So pervasive is their absence, it is nearly possible to draw up a list of novels featuring older women as the main characters and plan to read them all.

Of those older women who do make it to the page, most will have been reduced to stereotypes: the demented, the eccentric, the quarrelsome, the devoted yet sidelined grandmother, the…

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