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The Creative Longevity of Women Artists
by Susan Gubar
One of our most formidable literary critics explores how nine women artists flourished creatively in their final acts.
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. In Grand Finales, author Susan Gubar features women artists―George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O'Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mary Lou Williams, and Katherine Dunham―who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. She 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, Gubar counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities, and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age.
"A sympathetic portrait of old age." —Kirkus Reviews
"[A] wise and inspiring reminder that aging can be full of promise and possibility." —Publishers Weekly
"Brava! I'm giving a standing ovation for Grand Finales, a buoyant and inspiring book about real life women who've found joy and fulfillment in their second and even third acts, proving that life is what we make of it, and that happiness is possible at any age... . With Grand Finales, she's given me exactly what I need right now: hope." ―Meg Cabot, best-selling author of The Princess Diaries
"In Grand Finales, Susan Gubar, a remarkable old lady herself, ... transforms the meaning of old age and late-life creativity. Grand Finales is a tour de force." ―Nancy K. Miller, author of My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism
This information about Grand Finales was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susan Gubar is an acclaimed memoirist and literary critic. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. A Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University, she lives in Bloomington.
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