When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple (1991), edited by Sandra Martz, is a collection of prose, poetry, and photographs that explores the aging process in women in a positive light.

Barbara Pym's novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) explores with wry humor and gentle irony the lives of four single people in their sixties. In the face of solitude and aging, they do their best to construct meaningful lives.

William Shakespeare's King Lear (1605-06) is a harrowing play about an eighty-year-old king who is cast out by two of his daughters, and through extreme suffering finally attains a measure of wisdom and redemption.

"Today Is Sunday," one of the stories in Peter Ho Davies' collection Equal Love (2000), is interesting because it revolves around a situation that occurs twice in The Stone Angel, when a character pretends to be a...