title: Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)
author:  Kay Heath 
description: Heath adopts a sophisticated approach to the cultural construction of midlife  Her consideration of the subjective aspects of ageing adds to our understanding of midlife.  Victorian Studies<br><br>Aging by the Book  makes a persuasive case that it was the Victorian age that solidified modern understandings of what it means to be middle-aged  Heath, in a book that is divided between careful and thorough cultural history and literary readings, and that will likely prove helpful and thought-provoking to a wide range of Victorianists, sets out to show why and how the no-longer-excluded middle between youth and senior status comes about.  Nineteenth-Century Literature<br><br>this cultural history of midlifes invention also offers a new approach to nineteenth-century fiction: a literary history of aging heroes and heroines.  Studies in the Novel<br><br>By exploring the origins of a midlife decline ideology, Aging by the Book challenges readers to think more critically about the power of ageism in the present, making it an important read not only for Victorian scholars but for anyone interested in age studies.  Journal of British Studies<br><br>Heath does indicate, in her close and subtle reading of the texts she has chosen, that questions of age, love, and desire were complex and fluctuating, and that there was a degree of flexibility within certain limits of age and status.  Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies<br><br>Heaths treatment of the marriage plot raises interesting questions about age and Victorian realism.  CHOICE<br><br>From the shrewd situating of middle age as the liminal rather than central stage between youth and age to insightful rereadings of the marriage plot in relation to narratives of decline, Kay Heaths Aging by the Book is a significant contribution to both age studies and Victorian studies.  Teresa Mangum, author of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel
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  THE HERTFORD MANUSCRIPT
  
  
  by Richard Cowper
  
  
  Cowper combines a high quality British literary style with a background of
  historical understanding
  
  
  and thereby comes up with a sequel to “Wells’ immortal
  
  
  Time Machine that stands on its own.
  
  
  The death of my Great-Aunt Victoria at the advanced age of 93 topped off the
  longest branch of a family tree whose roots have been traced right back to the
  15th Centuryindeed, for those who are prepared to accept “Decressie” as a
  bonafide corruption of “de Crecy,” well beyond that. Talking to my aunt
  towards the end of her life was rather like turning the pages of a Victorian
  family album, for as she grew older the
  
  
  England of her childhood seemed to glow ever more brightly in her mind’s eye.
  In those far-off days it had been fashionable to accept the inevitability of
  human progress with a whole-heartedness which is almost impossible for us to
  imagine. In the 1990’s life presented
  
  
  Homo sapiens with a series of “problems” wh