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E. Nesbit's fiction is recognised for conveying the author's unconventional stance upon issues of paramount concern to fin-de-siècle and post-1900 Britain, including socialism, women's suffrage, and marriage. This essay reads her neglected novel Dormant (1911) through the lens of literary age studies to argue that it participates in the era's imaginative re-shaping of life-course possibilities, which focused especially on women. It finds Nesbit's notoriously contradictory feminist impulses mirrored by, and intersecting with, the novel's representations of age and ageing. Through age-defying and un-ageing characters, Dormant tantalises with queer prospects and "second-chance plots", which signify an expansive later-life potential that sits in seeming opposition to the youth-centric Bildungsroman. The eventual circumscription and withdrawal of such non-normative possibilities – through notions of "allotted time" and age-appropriateness – re-inscribes a narrative of decline in which age entails a narrowing of possibilities. Dormant's navigation of these ambiguities, this essay contends, makes it a crucial but as yet understudied reflection upon the tensions evoked by re-negotiations of age and ageing, and how the limits of an individual life are structured by them.
James Aaron Green (Tue,) studied this question.