I’m on the wrong side of 45 and I want my life to take a different turn. A turn towards writing, and if I’m lucky, being published. I don’t understand what took me so long to get here. Writing is something I have always wanted to do, but I mostly secreted that desire away somewhere so far from the light that even I barely knew it was there. My interest in word-smithing was channeled into academic papers and consultancy reports.
That long buried desire is surfaced now, and it is powerful. And I rue the time I’ve missed. The decades in which I could have been writing.
There are role models here. Especially women. Mary Wesley who did not publish her first novel until her 70s. Annie Proulx who recently won a lifetime achievement award, but reminded everyone in her acceptance speech that her first story collection was published when she was 53.
Then there was Mary Delany, whose life is captured in the wonderful book by Molly Peacock Paper Garden: Mrs Delany begins her Life’s Work at 72.
Mary Delany was born in England in 1700, into an aristocratic family. She was creative and musical throughout her life, in the way that was expected of women of the time.
She was married off at 17 to a slobbering drunk of 60, and must have been quite traumatised by the experience, because after he died when she was 23, she refused all offers of marriage, and relished in her freedom as a widow with a small income to support her.
She did eventually marry again (happily) at the age of 43 and her husband supported and encouraged all of her artistic endeavours.
After her husband died she created a new art of collage (or what she called paper mosaicks) where she created the most intricate, most delicate, beautiful and botanically accurate representations of flowers. They are now housed in the British Museum.
She started her first mosaick at the age of 72 and by the time she died at 88 she’d completed 985 of them, just short of her goal of 1000. So in an era when life expectancy would have suggested that 72 was a good long life, here is a woman who was intensely creative and productive in the last 15 years of her life.
Molly Peacock puts it beautifully:
Age is the sum of all we do. That’s a bit of what happens to a plant, too. It keeps adding up until it blooms, but even after blooming, after mid-life, so to speak, it keeps going, because it has to start withering. Only in drying does the real fertility begin, the seedcase forming, and only then are the seeds available to be blown apart and travel and settle. The fierce winter of dormancy is part of it all – the biennial approach to life.