Modelling Age: Ageing Women Writers and Their Readers (Annie Ernaux, Margaret Drabble)

Abstract

Abstract Annie Ernaux and Margaret Drabble, both now in their eighties, are writers who throughout their long careers have charted the life course of women of their generation. Ernaux’s Les Années (2008) and Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises (2016) share a focus on late life and — I argue here — represent cases of what Kathleen Woodward once defined as a much-needed feminist remodelling of old age. In this comparative analysis, I identify elements shared across these two generically and stylistically quite different works: their unromantic yet positive depiction of ageing women; their treatment of time and of relations between the individual self and the collectivity; the relationship each constructs between author and reader. The differences between them arguably point to the specificities of French and UK culture, notably in terms of the relative importance each attributes to sexuality throughout the life course. Overall, the two works converge more than they diverge in providing a vision of old age in the feminine that is at once clear-sighted and powerfully affirmative.