Best books on fading beauty: Bestselling author GILL HORNBY suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life

  • Here’s the funny thing about ageing: it’s easy to pretend it’s not happening
  • It’s all marvellous, as long as you never stand next to a young person
  • The only way to face the perils of ageing is with dignity

By Gill Hornby For The Daily Mail

Published: 17:13 EST, 5 February 2017 | Updated: 17:16 EST, 5 February 2017

The bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.  

Here’s the funny thing about ageing: it’s easy to pretend it’s not happening. Not the internal stuff, of course — the memory gaps, the ‘oof’ when you get out of a chair. That’s all, sadly, inescapable. But the ravages of age on your appearance? That’s a question of perspective.

If you don’t pass a mirror too often and when you do you leave your specs off, then — hey! — you haven’t changed a bit.

Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Evening by Susan Minot

It’s all marvellous, as long as you never stand next to a young person. The biggest shock of all is always the photo with a daughter — that skin, those lashes, the light in her eyes. That’s when you know the game is up.

Lucky Sir Walter Elliot, the vain, dim father in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, never had to endure the evils of the selfie and so could always see himself ‘as blooming as ever, amidst the wreck of the good looks of everybody else’.

Poor Anne, though, is less lucky. All anyone can talk about is the loss of her ‘bloom’. She hears, and knows, that Captain Wentworth, who loved her when she was young and in her prime, finds her ‘wretchedly altered’. And by this point she’s only 27.

But despite her grand old age, all is not lost. Anne’s youthful romance with Wentworth had been based on mutual attraction. However, when they find themselves older, they find something ‘more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character’. Love does not have to fade.

The bestselling author Gill Hornby suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life

The only way to face the perils of ageing is with dignity. In Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, the Henry Farrell thriller on which the famous film is based, Jane Hudson fails to do that, quite dramatically. The images of her pretending to be a little girl, bobby-socks on her ‘age-thickened legs’, a bow in her dyed cherry-red hair, are pure grotesque. If you don’t want to come over as a gothic horror then, please, dress your age.

Evening by Susan Minot is a novel of a life in the round, not just a snapshot. Ann Lord is 65 and dying, but was young once and loved extravagantly, marrying three times. The narrative zig-zags between the pile of bones suffering now on her death-bed and the vital young woman at the height of her powers. It is impossible not to be moved. So don’t worry about ‘fading’. We all are. Deal with it. At least, for the moment, we’re still here.

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