Product Description

Twenty-eight women, ranging from Anita Roddick and Prue Leith to less well-known names, write their own personal stories which are accompanied by Elizabeth Handy's black and white photographs and an introductory essay by Charles Handy. This generation of women is entering the sixties more healthy, more educated and more energetic than most of their mothers. The subjects in this book provide the models for what has become, for the first time, a new age for many women. Released from most of the cares and responsibilities that accompany midlife for women, they are free to reinvent themselves, to give more time to their career or calling, or to luxuriate in the serenity and friendships that few had time for in the past. Some enter new relationships, some start new careers or go back to study, some find that their work is only now reaching its peak. Many have survived traumas and tragedies, but 'the past is just the prologue' as one of them explains.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #239089 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 128 pages

Review
The fascinating message here is that life begins all over again at 60 for women these days. Twenty-eight women, unknown or, like Anita Roddick, well-known, present snapshot personal chapters relating how they are at the peak of their lives rather than feeling old and worn out as in previous generations. Instead of considering themselves retired, they are amazingly busy doing challenging things, and some have found fresh romance. As participant Brenda Weir says, no one reaches 60 without experiencing bereavement, betrayal, disappointment and disillusionment but despite - or because of - recent grave illness she is determined to enjoy her bonus years. Each life story is different but the optimism, vigour and appetite for variety amount to a truly extraordinary symphony. A perfect advertisement for being 60 plus.

About the Author
Elizabeth Handy is a successful portrait photographer. Her husband, Charles, is best known for books like The Age of Unreason and The Empty Raincoat. His books have sold well over a million copies around the world. This is their second major collaboration after The New Alchemists.

Excerpted from Reinvented Lives: Women at Sixty: a Celebration by Charles Handy, Elizabeth Handy. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The photographer reflects
I never imagined that, at sixty, I would be in the middle of a project like this book or that I would be a portrait photographer when I grew up, but I have never enjoyed my work and my life as much as I do now. At last I am doing something that is really me. It is such a privilege to take someone's portrait. They are allowing you into their lives for a short time and are trusting you with how they look. It is both a challenge and a responsibility because I want them to feel good about it, even, perhaps, to learn something about themselves.
For this book I have entered women's lives at sixty. At other times the portrait might mark an engagement, a wedding or a special anniversary, perhaps the moment when the children finally leave home - personal times. For me portrait photography is a chance to get to know different people from different generations and backgrounds in an intimate way. I love it and I take a secret pleasure when I see my portraits hanging on people's walls or placed in family albums. I like to think that many of my photographs will become part of a family's memory, passed down the generations, that when the digital snaps have long faded my black and white portraits will still be there. Portraits are social history.
My sixtieth birthday present to myself was a new darkroom and workroom. At last I now have my own space and my own mini-gallery. For six weeks I spent every morning in that darkroom processing the photographs for this book, relishing the excitement as I watched the prints emerging in the developing tray. Someone told me that photographers love risk. That must be true, because there are so many things that can go wrong, and there are, anyway, no rules for what a portrait should be. I am always experimenting. For someone who has never liked rules or regulations, photography has proved to be a great outlet for my eccentricity.
I was fifty when I got my degree in photography, but it was not until I was sixty that I started to do work that I felt good about. Unconsciously I waited until the children grew up and most of my elderly relatives had died before I could give my work the concentration that it needed. Only then could I justify indulging myself in what I wanted to do.
This was not the life I was expecting or had planned. I am not sure that I had really planned anything when I was young. I was an army daughter and spent most of my childhood travelling and living abroad. I moved house ten times and had been to ten different schools before I was eleven. Then my parents parked me in a girls' boarding school in England. There was no sixth form at the school. Everyone left at sixteen. We learnt no science subjects. So-called 'finishing schools' or secretarial colleges were the further education for most of us. Then it was marriage - some of my friends as early as nineteen.
For me, marriage happened at twenty-one and two children arrived a few years later. I spent many years squeezing in my work as best I could, first as an interior designer, and then as a counsellor with Marriage Guidance, in the intervals between looking after the children, running two houses, letting our flat to tenants, visiting elderly relations and entertaining friends, not to mention my husband's colleagues and students. During that time I also studied at the Open University. For a time, too, I was a school governor, a prison visitor and helped with an adult literacy programme.
Then, twenty years ago, my husband went freelance and I became his agent and manager, discovering, somewhat to his and my surprise, that I was rather good at it. Luckily, I have always enjoyed being busy, but it was my life as well as his, I felt, and that dormant passion for photography was beginning to surface. It was time to take it seriously. I bullied my way on to a part-time degree course and five years later found myself queuing up to look at the degree lists on the very day that our son was doing the same at his university. To our joint relief we both passed, with exactly the same class of degree. It doesn't matter when you do it, I reckoned then, if you want it enough you can always get it. I still believe that.
As I turned sixty, my first reaction was one of disbelief. Am I really sixty? Surely it cannot be me. Being sixty is what I associate with my mother - or my aunt - or someone else. But then I only have to look in the mirror or see a photograph of myself and the reality is there. Obviously I am no longer the young person that I think I am. I have bags under my eyes, a double chin and I am beginning to have the odd white hair….
…I feel now, at sixty-one, that I am in a stage of life where I can choose to do almost anything that I want to. We have a good life, my husband and I, still together and loving it, every part of it, after forty years. I know, however, that I should not count on this stage lasting for ever. Who knows for certain what is brewing inside us, or what accidents lie in wait? I worry only that there will not be enough of the sort of time we are now enjoying. Retirement is not an idea I can get my head around. As long as I can see something through my viewfinder, life will be worth living.

Customer Reviews

Not just for women
This is a fabulous, inspirational book, and it is not just for women. The individual stories vary, but the best of them show humility, modesty and sheer human grit. The most serious setbacks, the onset of 'ageism', prejudice and unspoken assumptions need not overwhelm us. The key is not to be ground down, and instead to shape your own destiny. Women at sixty are an interesting group, but anyone who has suffered a setback or reached a turning point in life could be an equally good example. This book is inspirational, provocative and reassuring all at the same time.

Inspirational stories
I was introduced to this book after meeting one of the ladies whose story is included in it. This book is about triumph over adversity and cuts across all social, cultural, age and racial barriers - all of the women are different but with an interesting story to tell - laughter, tears, amazement - it is all here. Women who are famous aswell as the everyday woman tell their stories which will make the phrase "I'm having a bad day" less of a throwaway remark. I intend to purchase a copy for my mother!

Julia Britten
I found this book to be quite inspirational. It gives a view on how life shoud be approaced rather than how society dictates it should be approached. I run workshps and give this out whenever I feel appropriate and it has always been well received.