New York, NY: Norton (June 2025)

Hardback.

New in dust jacket.

A formidable literary critic explores how nine women artists flourished creatively in their final acts

Despite the losses generally associated with ageing, quite a few writers, painters, sculptors, musicians and dancers have managed to extend and repurpose their creative energies. In Grand Finales, author Susan Gubar features women artists—George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mary Lou Williams and Katherine Dunham—who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. She draws on their late lives and works to suggest that seniority can become a time of reinvention and renewal. With pizzazz and bravado, Gubar counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age.

Susan Gubar is an acclaimed memoirist and literary critic. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. A Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Indiana University, she lives in Bloomington.