Differing perspectives, perhaps one should not judge...
Life Beyond Act One: Why We Need More Stories About Older Women.
Well, she does name-check Mrs Dalloway though she is not perhaps the most inspiring later-life figure -
- and I hazard that Winifred Holtby's South Riding is perhaps not the much-loved classic across the Atlantic that it is on these shores, with its early-middle-aged spinster schoolmarm Sara Burton, and its elderly local councillor Mrs Beddows and indeed a whole range of women of all ages.
There are books that deal with women outside of the love & marriage/and then it ends plot but maybe they get written out of the canon or sidelined into genre.
Though some are gradually being brought back via Virago/Persephone/Furrowed Middlebrow perhaps?
E.g. Amber Reeves, A Lady and Her Husband (1914).
Thinking of various of my pet interwar middlebrow lady authors, e.g. EM Delafield, GB Stern, not to mention in a rather different mode, the works of Sylvia Townsend Warner - Lolly Willowes is the best known but Summer will Show is also about married woman coming up to middle years breaking out.
Will also fail to resist temptation to cite dear Angus Wilson and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot(1958) and Late Call (1964).
Margaret Drabble. Doris Lessing.
Was also slightly, 'yes but' about this: Crime Fiction Is Complicit in Police Violence-But It’s Not Too Late to Change. On the one hand there is an alter-tradition of the hero/ine going down the mean streets and exposing the corruption of the system; on the other I do think of all those fairly cozy amateur lady sleuths who just happened to have a main squeeze or good pal in the local police dept, which made things a lot easier for their hawkshawing activities; and then on the prehensile tail there is also the tradition of those private eyes who mete out their own rough justice 'where the law cannot go' in sometimes problematic ways.
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