In her new article on the LiteraryLorna magazine on Substack, editor Lorna Brookes explores how a modern day account of the young lives of old women connects to the first known autobiography in the English language
The premise of Juliet Heslewood’s new memoir/biography OLD WOMAN YOUNG WOMAN is that ‘older women never lose their younger selves. They are just hidden’. Juliet sets out to uncover the forgotten young lives of the old women she knew as a child. Some were bad-tempered great aunts (‘aunts scowled’) while others lived a life of domestic drudgery, tending to their demanding and somewhat unfaithful menfolk. The London terrace occupied by granny Gogi with her neurodivergent son and thespian husband is sombre and shadowed. The 1950s gloom of post-war London is a fitting introduction to the concept that to young Juliet, the idea that her grandmother might also have once been young is as impenetrable as the old woman’s home.
For me as the editor of Juliet’s new book Old Woman Young Woman, the author’s means of telling the story of her relatives’ young lives yields a unique insight into the role of autobiography in bringing to light lives which might otherwise be invisible. Juliet is an established art historian, so she is more commonly found telling the life stories of artists such as Van Gogh and lecturing about them at celebrated locations such as the Ashmolean in Oxford. This means that Juliet is exceptionally well-qualified to write a straightforward biography of these women’s lives. However, Juliet has instead chosen to tell their stories by telling her own. She recounts her childhood – ensuring that her own past as a young woman is not hidden – and in the process of maturing and getting to know the histories of these old women, she reveals the epiphany moments which awakened her sense that they too had once been young.
For Gogi, that moment came when Juliet was a teenager learning Shakespeare. A quiet moment in a sunny garden gave Gogi, nearing the end of her life, the chance to step back into the shoes of Viola (Twelfth Night):
How was school? she inquired. I must have mumbled about my friends, lessons, uncomfortable beds, but soon she spoke words that were not her own.
Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemnèd love.
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills …
She paused. Her opened eyes looked not at me or the sun, but at whatever image had formed in her thoughts, prompted by the words. Where had she gone, so effortlessly?
“You know it … Viola’s speech,” I said, surprised.
“Of course, darling. I never forget my lines.”
To continue reading this free article and find out how Juliet’s book connects to the medieval autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe, visit the LiteraryLorna magazine on Substack.
Read the book: OLD WOMAN YOUNG WOMAN by Juliet Heslewood. In bookshops now.
Older women never lose their younger selves. They are just hidden.
To Juliet, growing up, it was impossible to imagine that each of the aged women who cast a mysterious shadow over her childhood had a history. It seemed as if they were always old.
But her granny Gogi, the Great Aunts, Floss, Dorki and Madame Holmes were far more than fierce visitors, unsuspecting victims or domestic drudges.
Now older herself, it is time for art historian Juliet Heslewood to tell her own story. It’s a journey into lost memories and the fragile records of what might have been.
‘Grey and lacy, stern yet kindly, they were removed from our childhood to an era inhabited in cloudy time …’