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Memory, Time, and Aging in the Work of Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood, and Doris Lessing
In a 2009 interview with Sarah Crown in the Guardian newspaper, the novelist Penelope Lively remarked that "in old age you can close your eyes and summon your youth at will. As a writer it puts one at a distinct advantage." She added: "the idea that memory is linear ... is nonsense."1 Aging is clearly a topic of increasing interest for a number of contemporary women writers, and new critical approaches to aging and gender in this field are beginning to burgeon. The focus in the majority of critical work has often been on how literary texts address the theme or subject of aging; however, as Livelys comments in the Guardian interview suggest, and as I will argue here, aging is capable of generating in fiction a new relationship among time, memory, family history, and form. Through a close study of Penelope Livelys Family Album, which was published in 2009, and with briefer allusion to Margaret Atwood s The Blind Assassin (2000) and Doris Lessing's Love, Again (1996), this essay will argue that these writers' engagement with aging and gender allows them to create their own kind of "late style," to borrow from Edward Said. Lively in particular draws on fictional devices (such as the deliberate refusal of narrative tension or suspense) that make us consider how we rethink the pattern of a life as we age.
This essay begins with a brief survey of recent feminist writing about aging, arguing that this work tends to focus on how aging is represented, rather than how it might impact form. The critical work that does pay attention to the relationship between aging and form, or the idea of "late style," will then be considered, particularly the work of Edward Said in his On Late Style. However, the majority of work on "late style" does not consider the issue of gender.
The novelists we are concerned with here have all made comments in interviews and essays, which will then be discussed, about the importance of the gendered aging process in allowing them to rethink structure and form in fiction. However, I want to make a distinction between The Blind Assassin and...