Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists

by Susan Gubar Narrated by Linda Jones

Overview

In 2008, academic and scholar Susan Gubar was told by a trusted oncologist that she had only a few years left to live. Though she outlived that dire prognosis, this brush with mortality refocused her attention on the boons of a longevity she did not expect to experience. She began to think: In the last years of our lives, can we shape and change our creative capabilities? The resulting volume, Grand Finales, answers this question with a resounding yes. 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. Gubar spotlights very creative old ladies: writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers from the past and in our times.



Each of Grand Finales' nine riveting chapters features women artists-George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O'Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Lou Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Katherine Dunham-who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. Gubar 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, she counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities, and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"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

"Grand Finales is a fascinating exploration of the diverse flowering of women creatives as they confront—and embrace—the challenges of aging. . . . It’s a road map for living with the conviction that our ‘best is’ always ‘yet to come.’"— Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University

"Like the nine women artists and writers whose late-life creative energy she discusses in Grand Finales, Susan Gubar’s critical powers are exuberant and bold in this late-life work of feminist criticism."— Elaine Showalter, professor emerita of English at Princeton University

Kirkus Reviews

2025-03-22
Feisty ladies of a certain age.

Award-winning memoirist and literary critic Gubar was 63 when, in 2008, she was diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer and given three to five years to live. After debilitating surgeries and chemotherapies, she enrolled in a clinical trial that proved successful, giving her an unexpected chance to experience old age—and to wonder how other women navigated this period of their lives. Although older women are stereotypically depicted as feeble, discountable, and unremarkable, Gubar has discovered that many found new bursts of creativity in the “grand finale” of their lives. As evidence, she offers succinct biographies of nine creative women—selected from a host of others appearing in the book—whose later years she groups under three categories: Lovers (writers George Eliot and Colette, artist Georgia O’Keeffe) who took younger men as companions; Mavericks (writer Isak Dinesen, poet Marianne Moore, artist Louise Bourgeois) who cultivated their idiosyncrasies; and Sages (jazz musician Mary Lou Williams, poet Gwendolyn Brooks, dancer-choreographer Katherine Dunham) who devoted themselves to the needs of their community. For Gubar’s stubborn mavericks, “roguish old age” offered a time “in which they flaunted their deeply eccentric spirits.” As different as they were from one another, Dinesen, Moore, and Bourgeois donned “odd outfits” and engaged in blatant self-mythologizing, leaning into their personas as “sly old ladies.” Gubar’s three sages were Black women influenced by religion, the Civil Rights Movement, and social injustice to find new outlets for their talents and new ways to engage with the world. Gubar cites many other aging women—artist Faith Ringgold and designer Iris Apfel, and writers Grace Paley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Annie Ernaux, among others, to ring in on the lively possibilities—of productivity, connection, and reinvention—in one’s last years.

A sympathetic portrait of old age.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193887287
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/10/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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