Myths, Revisited: The Ageing Woman in Sara Maitland’s Feminist Retellings

In this article, I investigate the representation of ageing women in Sara Maitland’s short story collection On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003). Rejecting the cultural imperative that would push women to the side-lines after hitting menopause, Maitland’s mythical revisions place them and their lives in the limelight. To this end, I draw on cultural gerontology to analyse the techniques Maitland employs to reimagine characters from foundational myths of the western tradition, such as Helen of Troy and Deborah the Prophetess, as agentic, ageing protagonists. Ultimately, I show that through her sustained challenging of conventional scripts on gender and age, Maitland offers a complex, often contradictory collection that destabilises univocal narratives of desexualisation and decline in post-menopausal women.