Overview

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.

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9781324065647

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Reviews

Grand Finales is a fascinating exploration of the diverse flowering of women creatives as they confront--and embrace--the challenges of aging. . . . It's a road map for living with the conviction that our 'best is' always 'yet to come.'--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University Brava! I'm giving a standing ovation for Grand Finales, a buoyant and inspiring book about real life women who've found joy and fulfillment in their second and even third acts, proving that life is what we make of it, and that happiness is possible at any age. . . . With Grand Finales, she's given me exactly what I need right now: hope.--Meg Cabot, best-selling author of The Princess Diaries In Grand Finales, Susan Gubar, a remarkable old lady herself, . . . transforms the meaning of old age and late-life creativity. Grand Finales is a tour de force.--Nancy K. Miller, author of My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism Like the nine women artists and writers whose late-life creative energy she discusses in Grand Finales, Susan Gubar's critical powers are exuberant and bold in this late-life work of feminist criticism.--Elaine Showalter, professor emerita of English at Princeton University

Author Information

Susan Gubar is an acclaimed memoirist and literary critic. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. A Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University, she lives in Bloomington.

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