New books challenge ageist stereotypes

If older women move through the world with a sense of being unseen, in the world of books, and especially in contemporary fiction, they have all but been erased.

So pervasive is their absence, it is nearly possible to draw up a list of novels featuring older women as the main characters and plan to read them all.

Of those older women who do make it to the page, most will have been reduced to stereotypes: the demented, the eccentric, the quarrelsome, the devoted yet sidelined grandmother, the meddling mother-in-law, the faded beauty, the disappointed spinster.

Now at last, two novels by Australian authors feature older women as main characters.