“A Female, & Past 60 Years of Age!”: Older Age in Women’s Later Life Writing 1800–1850

This chapter addresses how women used life-writing forms, particularly journals and letters, to explore the gendered experience of growing older in the early 19th century. The traditional focus of life-writing scholars on childhood and ‘coming of age’ has diversified in recent years, but discussion of older women’s life narratives has been dominated by published texts from the mid-20th century onwards. This comparative study of the later life writing of Frances Burney (1752-1840) and Catherine Hutton (1756-1846) in both print and manuscript seeks to extend the conversation to an earlier period. These sources reveal a dynamic engagement between past and present selves, our own lives and the lives of others, that help to challenge a narrative of older age aligned with stasis, decline, or isolation. Focusing on the processes of composition, dissemination, and preservation of these texts also suggests the attitudes towards older age that inform editorial and publishing practices. Read in dialogue, the life writing of Burney and Hutton shows that the conjunction between age studies, life-writing theory, and 19th-century women’s writing can generate new understanding of the (gendered) experience of aging, as well as providing fresh perspectives on life writing by recognizing older age as a crucial category of identity.