Anna Graham

Visiting Early Career Research Fellow

Anna Graham completed her PhD at Queen’s University Belfast (2023). It examined representations of ageing women in early modern drama. She has publications in the 'Postgraduate Journal of Medical Humanities' and in 'Much Ado About Nothing and the New Awareness'. She held the Barker Visiting Fellowship.

About the research project

The project will produce the first study of old age in early modern Britain as an intersectional identity in women’s life writing. It asks:

• How does old age reinforce or complicate other female identities?
• How do women engage with the process of growing older?
• How does old age impact authorial identity?
• What is the relationship between the creation of aged identity and the material evidence of the handwritten text?

This project aims to disprove the commonly held notion that women’s ageing processes were unimportant, and elucidates the ways women tapped into associations of old age in life writing as a strategic mobilisation. It reveals for the first time the lived experience of aged women in early modern Britain and Ireland.

This project demonstrates that old age was not just a biological marker for women during the period, but an aspect of identity that impacted how they viewed themselves in every avenue of their lives. It centres women’s narratives of ageing in the form of life writing and cultural representations to confront the reality that age impacts aspects of their identity like motherhood, spirituality, class, and political identity.

Over the course of this fellowship, the project will aim to identify the voices of aging women from the archives and determine whether aging women have a continued role in the family, and whether they retain their authoritative stature in society through their old age. This research will not only provide a new way of thinking about women’s writing from a feminist perspective, but will be of interest to the wider early modern community as it provides new information on epistolary tradition and the allowances given to aging women whose frail bodies command that they break convention.