Was Jane Austen the first writer to show how it really feels to be a middle-aged woman?
Before Austen, literature’s iconic perimenopausal woman was the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who regales the medieval pilgrims with a scandalous account of her five marriages, including the fact she enjoyed sex with her last husband despite a 20-year age gap.
It’s very All Fours (Miranda July’s wildly popular midlife crisis novel from 2024). The Wife of Bath is charismatic and original, but not hugely sympathetic. Then there’s Gertrude in Hamlet, another middle-aged lady with a vibrant sex life and an ambivalent attitude to her adult son.
