Too Old for Happy Ever After?

On older heroines in romance novels, part one

When I got the idea to write a novel featuring an “older” heroine, I pitched the idea to my editor before I wrote a word. It felt a little daring and edgy (why?!) and I wasn’t sure if she would go for it. 

“How old?” she asked nervously. “Thirty-six,” I answered.  

At the time, I was thirty-six and did not feel old, dried up, “over” or any of the things I had grown up expecting to feel when I reached this age. My editor was the same age. But still, thirty-six felt like the oldest I could get away with in romance. “Too old,” she said. 

I wrote her anyway. Beatrice Goodwin, age 36 and the heroine of An Heiress to Remember is also a divorcee, having ditched a duke. And not one reader complained about her age or marital status. 

Since I started reading the genre, romance heroines have been aging on the page and we’re all pretty okay with it, despite conventional wisdom. My first encounter with an “older” heroine was Amanda Briar in Suddenly You by Lisa Kleypas. Amanda was a tragic virgin spinster at 29. 

After Amanda, I noticed an increasing number of older heroines, particularly in the Regency where I spent most of my time. Older, of course, being beyond their first season at the age of eighteen. 

My hunch is that as the typical IRL age of marriage moved upward, it became cringey to read about 18 year-old heroines finding everlasting love and happiness in their first relationship right out of the schoolroom, especially if the hero was significantly older. I think we all had in the back of our mind the statistics about young marriages tending not to last (cheers to the high school sweethearts who are making it!). Or we shuddered at the thought of being married to whoever we were dating at that age. Or we all knew how much fun was to be had being single in our twenties or thirties. 

We solved this problem in historical romance with spinsters and wallflowers who were “on the shelf” at the old age of 25. Or we solved it with the subgenre of New Adult and the Happy For Now (HFN) ending. 

And now, we are finding the joy and fun in the Older Heroine.  

First of all, what even is an older heroine? 

At what age does a woman go from simply heroine to older heroine? Of course no one wrote this rule down anywhere, but there is a vibe. There is a vibe, shared by my editor and myself, that something changes around thirty-six. As I am not the only one interested in reading or writing older heroines, I reached out to some of my fellow authors—Eva Leigh, Karen Booth and Dr. Sandra Antonelli—for their perspective. 

Eva Leigh (author of Waiting for a Scot Like You) notes that the definition of “older heroine” can depend on the era in which the story is set. She says, “If it’s contemporary, my feeling is that forty+ is an older heroine, but with historical romance, my arbitrary threshold is around thirty, give or take a few years.” 

Karen Booth, who wrote the marvelous novel Gray Hair Don’t Care (the first in a marvelous series) has seen a shift. She said, “Ten years ago, I would’ve said 35+. Lately I’ve said 40+, but even that feels too young to me now. For the purpose of romance, I think it’s anything outside what traditional romance publishers deem marketable and therefore, worth publishing. Publishers still don’t seem to want heroines older than 35. That number makes them nervous. They still prefer the magical age of 29.”

The angst around women and aging is not new. There is much to be said about it, but I will only share this distinct memory from my latch-key afternoons watching MTV (I am “remember when MTV played music videos years old). It was Madonna, probably thirty-six years old, scoffing at interviewer, “What am I supposed to do, put myself out to pasture when I turn forty?” 

Is a woman’s story really just supposed to end when hits a certain age? 

Older is not just a number, it becomes a point of view. When the age of the heroine changes, her story changes in some interesting ways. The yearnings are different and the fucks are fewer. The sex is still great and the endings are still happy. 

The stories of older heroines are less centered around marriage and babies 

When a heroine is of a certain age, where certain biological things are simply not going to happen, her story can become about something else. When an accidental pregnancy can’t force a relationship forward or when the heroine is a widow in a historical romance, getting caught in a compromising position isn’t going to have the same life-altering consequences. What this means is the couple has to grow together on their own terms instead of being forced together by society.  

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m against marriage and babies here (have fully engaged with both in my personal life, and very happily so). But I’m interested in how we expect our stories—especially our female centered stories and romance novels—to have the goal of marriage and motherhood. I’m especially interested in how writing that out of the narrative equation gives breathing room for the heroine’s journey to be about something else. Kind of in the same way that a male/male romance novel can be about something else. 

The stage of life makes a difference, as Eva Leigh notes. “Older heroines in historical romances are often widows, as is the case with my books, so there’s an understanding of how their first marriage is entered into either naively or out of a sense of duty, which is a disservice to the heroine’s own agency and desires. She’s played the broodmare, now it’s time for her to seize the reins and take control of her own ambition and personhood.” 

I have often joked that romance novels take place before the marriage and literary fiction takes place after the wedding. One is often all sparks and sizzle, and one is about the slog (yes, this is a massive over simplification of both real life and the fiction about it). Stories with older heroines are a rebellion or at least a counterpoint to the notion that a woman’s destiny is being a wife and mother and that it is the be-all, end-all of her existence. 

Now it’s all about her and what she wants. 

Related: Do we need babies in an HEA? 

The stories of older heroines pack more emotional complexity 

I still remember reading Karen Booth’s love, Grey Hair Don’t Care, and revealing in the story of Lela and Donovan, who were best friends in college until they slept together. Years (and a few divorces) later, they reconnect and the stakes couldn’t be higher because now they’re collaborating—with his daughter!—on bringing Lela’s flourishing beauty brand to the next level. I remember reveling in the “grown-up-ness” of the book. There were no dumb or cute antics; at this point the hero and heroine learned to get out of their own way and deal with big, complex emotions which meant we the readers got to revel in all the big feels. As I wrote in my NPR review at the time: “It's got all the sparkles and tingles of first love, but without all the angst and BS. Just sexy, confident, competent people finding everlasting love.” 

Being fifty, being divorced, these characters had more experiences to draw on. As Booth says, “The biggest thing is that an older heroine has been through some serious stuff and is grappling with the changes life throws at us all, like second chances, life after losing someone, blending families, career turmoil, aging parents, health issues. Those are big obstacles, so it can add a lot of complexity to the story.” 

With that experience also comes self-knowledge. Leigh describes these heroines as having discovered things about themselves that have been “buried beneath the heavy weight of patriarchal expectations and roles” and  “It’s about learning who she is rather than who society demands her to be.” 

Similarly, Booth finds that older heroines have fewer negotiables and “She has a stronger sense of what she does and doesn’t want, and she’s already lived through the ramifications of bad decisions.” That, combined with different stakes and a stronger sense of self makes for a heroine who is, to quote, Leigh, “a Queen and not a pawn.” 

This is getting into “dangerous books” territory if you ask me. Because these are stories that celebrate women who are unconstrained by domestic cares, who are not afraid of emotional complexity because they have cultivated skills to handle it head on, who are no longer inhibited by society and who fearlessly and unapologetically pursue whatever it is they want. 

An older heroine knows what she wants and does whatever the fuck she wants. And whatever she wants might involve sex. 

My favorite example of this is an Eva Leigh novel, Waiting for a Scot Like You, where the widowed heroine is unapologetically on her way to an orgy. To participate. To the horror of her grown children. And to the dismay of the young hunk they send along as her chaperone because “propriety.” You will absolutely guess what happens next on the way to the orgy and it’s wonderful: a woman who is so sure of herself, who no longer cares what other people think and who has a marvelous time. And then she finds true love and happy ever after. 

And yet. We are told that no one wants to read about older women, particularly because they don’t want to think about them having sex. 

When Booth was pitching her book Bring Me Back, she received some pretty horrifying “editorial” feedback. They told her: “You can’t write about a 40 year old woman having sex.” And “Nobody wants to read granny sex.” Or “Women over 40 belong in Women’s Fiction. Not romance.” This story has a happy ending—Booth says, “The number one comment I get from readers is how excited they are to read a sexy romance about a woman close to their own age.” 

There is a disconnect between what publishers and marketers think they can sell and what readers want or will enjoy. But the blame is not just with publishers and marketers. This ageist attitude can be internalized by anyone. I’m thinking of myself. True story: I am working on a novel about the history of how women got the vote in America. It took SEVENTY-TWO YEARS of persistent agitation for them to do it! I wanted to write about a woman who was there in the beginning and who lived to vote in the end but that would have made her “old” for a majority of the book so I started plotting about time-traveling witches or magical women who somehow didn’t age, all of which could be super cool, but the point is this: look at the gymnastics I was attempting in order to not have an older heroine. In this latest draft, she is aging fiercely and fabulously on the page. 

The “problem” with older women (and older heroines) having sex is that it is obviously not for procreational purposes and thus purely just for the fun and pleasure of it. I know—fetch your smelling salts. Delving into the social anxieties around women and pleasure and sexual pleasure on their own terms is beyond the scope of this newsletter, but I think it speaks to some of the angst around older heroines in romance novels. 

Meanwhile, those of us without such anxieties find a lot of delight in these heroines who are unconstrained, unapologetic and having the time of their lives. So why don’t we see more of them? That is the topic for next week’s post. 

Read part 2: Can We Blame it on the Patriarchy?

Check out the Essential Older Heroines Reading List.