Grand Finales — Susan Gubar

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

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.