AustLit

As Penelope Lively puts it in her memoir Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time: ‘One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here’ Lively is part of a growing number of women writers and artists who are not only productive in their later years but who provide valuable accounts both fictional and autobiographical -of their own ageing. They follow in the footsteps of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir,  Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Lynne Segal and Ashton Applewhite, motivated to write about their ageing by their need to bridge the gap between the lived experiences of growing older and the dominant cultural narrative of ‘old age’ as a negative thing to be avoided and disguised. This negotiation is especially pertinent with regard to women, who, to this day, face ‘a double standard of ageing’ and for whom ‘aging casts its shadow earlier than for men’ . In view of the limited positive role models for ageing women, the desire to communicate one’s own authoritative report from the unknown territory of old age is shared by older women from all walks of life and there is an increasing need to have their diverse voices heard and acknowledged. Therefore, the focus of this special issue is on the ways older women’s life narrative redefines culturally imposed conceptions of what it means to get older. Drawing on research from cultural gerontology and critical age studies, the authors acknowledge, explore and contextualise women’s experiences of getting older, thus counterbalancing the mainly one-sided, negative representations of ageing as perpetuated by dominant cultural discourse. In doing so, they focus on diverse forms of life writing including memoirs and (auto)biography, digital and visual forms of life narrative as well as autoethnographic accounts.' (Margaret O’Neill & Michaela Schrage-Früh : Introduction)