To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Judith Claire Mitchell, author of the forthcoming ‘A Reunion of Ghosts’ celebrates the indefatigable Madame Manec from Anthony Doerr’s ‘All The Light We Cannot See’…
‘I live in a world that has little use for elderly women, and yet, if I’m lucky, an elderly woman is what I will someday be. I think about this from time to time. It’s not that I’m horrified by the thought of ageing. I’m actually intrigued by it. I’m a novelist, after all. I’m interested in how stories unfold, how they twist and turn, how they conclude. This applies to my own story as well.
What disturbs me is the culture’s dismissal of women who have the temerity to grow old, and the way that, at a certain point, a cloak of invisibility falls upon women, a cloak that is heavy and hard to shrug off and can even, I fear, come to feel comfortable.
