Penelope Lively wants to reinvent our idea of widow. Her new book Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life In Time was published last week, written ‘from the view of old age’. In a piece for the Telegraph on Sunday’s Stella magazine, Lively writes ‘I had more than 40 years of coupledom; to find yourself alone after that is to feel curiously curtailed, as though now you are only a half, no longer a whole.’ She has had to adopt a whole new way of living, and she is not alone. It is a common known fact that women outlive their male counterparts, and she reflects ‘life expectancy for women in this country is 82, for men – 78. But in reality, looking around, the gap seems more pronounced.’ She believes widows of today are a force to reckoned with – they’re in better health and want to spend their time being active and engaged, ‘I look around at my widowed friends, and the stereotype evaporates: one is a briskly busy academic, another writes books that are read around the world, another – at 85 – is a sheep farmer’. Not Victorian matriarch’s dressed head to toe in black then.

Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life In Time is available from Penguin Books now.

Text by Beccy Hill

Tags: Penelope Lively, Penguin Books