Literary Tales of Late Life

Studies of late life as a cultural construct rooted in particular literary and historical moments have blossomed in recent years, although age has long implicitly organized the field of literary studies. For instance, stages of life frame the literature and scholarship we refer to as ‘children's literature’ and the novels we classify as Bildungsromanen. However, most of us are usually oblivious to the impress of age on texts and on the ways we read them. Seldom before the last decades of the twentieth century does one encounter a novel like Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853) that insistently trains readers' attention on the bodies, emotions, plots and problems of older characters. In Cranford, even middle-aged female characters are costumed in the language, lines and wardrobes of elderly-ness. The village of its title is a stage – in both senses of the word – of late life. Critics often apologize for the unusual form of Gaskell's novel, attributing the episodic pace to the novel's origins in Dickens's magazine Household Words where it grew from one story to many between 1851 and 1853, but the topography that maps what matters to elderly, impoverished female Cranfordians is overlooked. Conversely, when one reads the novel with sympathetic and rigorous attention to the aesthetic embroideries of age, not only the characters, but the relations, objects, spaces, experiments with language, and the very form of the novel situate Cranford prominently in what might turn out to be an unacknowledged genre, a late life counterpart to the Bildungsroman.