Grand Finales
The Creative Longevity of Women Artists
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
One of our most formidable literary critics explores how nine women artists flourished creatively in their final acts.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist and literary critic Gubar (Memoir of a Debulked Woman) wrestles with mortality and creativity in these graceful profiles of nine female artists who reinvented themselves later in life. After beating a terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis, the author wondered how other female artists dealt with the realities of aging. She explores how painter Georgia O'Keeffe's "impaired vision" in her latter years inspired her to shift away from brightly colored still lifes to translucent, "elemental" skyscapes painted from memory; how dancer Katherine Dunham's knee problems led her to devise the "Dunham Technique," a method that involved isolating certain parts of the body; and how Joan Didion's late memoirs reveal old age as an opportunity to tell "difficult truths about the female body." Throughout, the author remains clear-eyed about the challenges of getting older—maintaining agency despite health problems, weathering friends' deaths—even as she frames it as an opportunity to pursue art free from obligations to work and raise children, and more broadly as a "terra incognita" that provides new material yet is seldom explored in creative work. The result is a wise and inspiring reminder that aging can be full of promise and possibility.
