Midlife progress and the Reifungsroman as civic engagement in Fredrik Backman’s Britt-Marie Was Here and Marian Keyes’s My Favourite Mistake

This article examines how midlife and later-life development function as forms of civic engagement in Fredrik Backman’s Britt-Marie Was Here (2016) and Marian Keyes’s My Favourite Mistake (2024). Reading the novels through the lenses of ageing studies and cultural gerontology, it argues that women’s ageing is represented as a mode of public labour grounded in maintenance, mediation, and the management of social atmosphere. Drawing on Margaret Gullette’s concept of the midlife progress novel and Barbara Waxman’s concept of the Reifungsroman, or novel of ripening, alongside Kathleen Woodward’s work on reminiscence and Christopher Bollas’s theorization of mood, the article shows how personal growth in both texts is inseparable from the practical work of sustaining collective life. In Backman’s novel, later-life ripening is enacted through routines of care and maintenance that stabilize a fragile community, while in Keyes’s novel midlife progress takes the form of persuasion, coordination, and civic tact. Situated within Swedish and Irish cultural contexts that have historically constrained the visibility of ageing women, these novels reframe often negative age-associated qualities as civic capacities. They imagine ageing as an active condition that furnishes the ground for communal renewal.