Aging reimagined: Exploring older women’s attitudes to aging through reader response

Abstract

Since the 1970s, concern with questions of reception within literary studies has been, at best, sporadic. This essay presents early insights from a pioneering research study, conducted in 2009–10, involving a rehabilitated form of reader-response analysis. Working with 80 volunteers (of average age 70), the study used fiction to create a space of critical reflection on the changing experience of aging. Volunteers were recruited from the Universities of the Third Age, a network of self-help cooperatives for older people: over the course of a year, they read and reflected on a series of fictional texts. This essay focuses on the responses of older women readers to one particular novel, Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. Setting their varied and thought-provoking responses within the changing context of contemporary age-culture, the essay highlights some of the neglected possibilities of reader-response as a mode of analysis capable of shedding significant new light on the gendered experience of aging.