Memo to novelists: older women have sexual desires
by Vesna Main
I remember reading a letter in a national broadsheet from a woman in her nineties, who wrote that her lover of many years, a man in his eighties, had found someone else. It wasn’t her abandonment that shocked her most but her inability to cope without physical intimacy. She felt that, at her age, she should not have such needs.
I kept thinking of the woman and, as time passed, she spoke to me and I arranged her story in chapters, gathering events around characters and themes. But the linear narrative felt phoney, alien to the way memory works. Then I saw her, lying in bed one Sunday morning, looking forward to a party, to reading Eliot, hoping to see Leonardo’s ‘Magi’ at the Uffizi once again. She recalled another Sunday 30 years earlier, the morning after the night, when widowed, following a long marriage, she experienced her first ever orgasm. Memories surged, linked by random associations. Here was Claire Meadows, a retired piano teacher, still physically fit and mentally agile at 92. In Waiting for A Party, her story starts and ends with the eternal female yes, that memorable echo of Molly Bloom, another woman lying in bed and dreaming of love. As with Molly, Claire’s story emerges through a stream of consciousness.
When I write fiction, I seek a voice, or a form, a style appropriate to the character and the story, what one of Claire Keegan’s protagonists calls a scent. That’s why each of my books is formally different from the others. Plot is of secondary importance. Messages, political or otherwise, do not figure in my writing, neither as a starting point, nor a motivating impulse. But they may be there for particular readers: as a reader of my own novel, I realised that Waiting for A Party unwittingly counters the way older women are presented in our society.
Research shows that those older people who are lucky enough to stay healthy and enjoy reasonable living standards, have the best time of their lives since, free from family and professional commitments, they can dedicate themselves to their own development. Further, studies from the US, Israel and Sweden found that optimal sexual experience is achieved in our mid-fifties and that physical intimacy between adults in their 60s, and into their 80s, improves over the years. And yet, in popular perception old age is feared as a time of physical and mental decline. Besides, gerontophobia is at its most implacable when crossed with gynophobia. Once past the menopause, women are meant to age gracefully.
Can literature affect this gap between the evidence and research on one hand and our society’s representation of older people, and women in particular, on the other?
I can think of very few novels that feature older women as having legitimate physical desires. As my heroine protests, ‘older women are not written about, they are written off’.
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In Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987), a 76-year-old woman remembers lovers from her younger days and Doris Lessing’s 60-year-old protagonist in Love Again (1997), falls in love with two young men, but her feelings remain unexpressed. The 80-year-old Chance sisters in Angela Carter’s Wise Children (1991) have rumbustious sex but the novel’s comic tone and magic realism effect a parody. More recently, Jane Campbell’s collection Cat Brushing (2022) features older heroines frankly recalling their intimate desires. Campbell acknowledges that ‘sexual feeling in older women is […] problematic for their families and society in general’.
Enter Claire Meadows. Content with her middle-class widowhood, unaware of her needs, she is determined to age gracefully. But by the end of the novel, she has grown: she knows who she is, what she wants and how to achieve it. Having witnessed her journey of personal development and sexual awakening, the reader is not surprised that, at 92, Claire wonders whether there are more adventures in store, and when her memories trigger sexual desires, she reaches for her vibrator. The reader, male and female, I hope, may take pleasure in knowing that.
Vesna Main was born in Zagreb, Croatia, where she studied Comparative Literature, before obtaining a Phd in Elizabethan Studies from the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. She later worked as a journalist, lecturer and arts administrator.
Her published fiction includes a short story collection, Temptation (Salt, 2018), a novel-in-dialogue, Good Day? (Salt, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize, an autofiction, Only A Lodger … And Hardly That (Seagull Books 2020), and a novella, ‘Bruno and Adèle’ in Shorts III (Platypus Press, 2021). Two of her stories are published in Best British Short Stories (Salt 2017, 2019); many others have appeared in journals in print and online.
In her writing, Main is interested in telling stories in ways that explore and extend the boundaries of the narrative genre.