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Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists
Hardcover
Fiction AnthologiesGeneral ArtGeneral World History
Publisher Price: $35.00
ISBN13: 9781324065647
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: Jun 10 2025
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.25
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.
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