Although Victorian scholars have recently been paying more attention to what it means to be old, what has been lacking is a theorizing of middle age as a vital factor in the formation of identity. Expanding on Margaret Morganroth Gullette's premise that the nineteenth century gave rise to the development of the modern “midlife crisis,” Kay Heath fills this gap with a thought-provoking, accessible study. She argues for the Victorian period as the moment when perceptions of middle age moved away from the notion of being in one's prime toward that of beginning to decline, situating this “midlife decline ideology” as an integral component to understanding age anxiety, both as it is represented and experienced.

How did the Victorians define midlife? Chapter 1 establishes a sociological, historical framework for understanding nineteenth-century perceptions of aging. To a society invested in demarcating the chronological onset of old age—one need only turn to the vitriolic debates over the Old Age Pensions Act or to Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period (1882), which offers the satirical solution of euthanasia for everyone aged sixty-seven. The unfixedness of midlife presents an ideally disquieting space through which to interrogate the shifting anxieties that accrued to the aging body. As a category, middle age resists both cultural and biological markers of its inception and cessation. Heath establishes the centrality of this resistance, citing liminality as the key characteristic of representations of middle age in the “midlife plots” of Victorian novels.

The book analyzes an expansive cohort of novelists, some of whom are expected—Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde, and Anthony Trollope, for example—and others who come as interesting surprises, such as Dinah Mulock Craik and Caroline Norton. Situating these novels in a dialectic with cultural documents, including medical literature, demographic data, conduct literature, and legislative debates, produces a nuanced reading of the discursive relationship between “particular assumptions” about identity and the “notion of midlife” (3) that complicates them. As Heath notes, the texts she cites are not comprehensive; rather, they embody a representative sampling of a broader literary and cultural engagement with middle age. Further, to focus on gender as a crucial component of age anxiety, the project's scope is almost exclusively limited to representations of white, middle- or upper-class heteronormative subjects, an approach that should generate further studies of the complexities midlife presents to other identity formations, including race, sexuality, disability, and class.

The next three chapters examine the gendering of middle age through midlife iterations of the marriage plot. Chapter 2 looks at male midlife as generative of debilitating loss, as masculinity was increasingly aligned to prowess—physical and professional—over the course of the century. Heath begins with Charlotte Brontë's Edward Rochester as an example of virile success and ends with Anthony Trollope's William Whittlestaff as a testament to the failure of midlife masculinity's attempts at love. From the 1850s onward, narratives repeatedly devalued these midlife men as objects of social and sexual desire. This devaluation adheres both to men and women, although women experience its debility more rapidly than their male counterparts.

Chapter 3 begins with Eliza Lynn Linton's “La Femme Passé” (1868), which voices the common view of female midlife as a time of “sexless service,” a “menopausal trope” invoked to proscribe desirability (and marriageability) in women “of a certain age” (75). This sacrificial paradigm appears in gynecological texts and takes on prescriptive power, even as some medical opinions posit postmenopause as a time of physical vigor. While Charles Dickens offers sensitive portraits of failed romances for midlife men, his representations of transgressive midlife women unflinchingly veer toward the monstrous. In contrast, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1851–53) and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) represent women who challenge, but ultimately conform, to the “sexless service” ideal. Most interesting is Heath's reading of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1865–66) as a successful reversal of the “customary roles of matron and ingénue” (99), with the titular character promoting marriage for a middle-aged widow while deferring her own.

Chapter 4 takes up the figure of the remarrying widow. Frances Trollope's delightfully vulgar Martha Barnaby, the self-determined widow who unabashedly desires remarriage, garners comedic scorn and censure for her desire. Revisioning this type, Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels' widows experience transformative, progressive second-chance plots. The Divorce Act of 1857 offers one rationale behind this shift. While in the early part of the century widows were “isolated into an emotional suttee” (118), by the 1860s widows were more respectable as marriage seekers than their divorced sisters, who were often vilified in the press.

Chapter 5 turns its gaze to the mirror as a producer of meaning for middle age. Expanding Kathleen Woodward's theory of the “mirror stage of old age” to include a consideration of midlife, Heath interrogates the “age scripts” characters produce through their mirror gazing in novels by Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and Anthony Trollope. The scrutinizing gaze of middle age detects the first signs of decay: the single gray hair, the almost imperceptible crow's foot. This presentiment of the loss to come—the disintegration of old age—begins in this moment; yet, characters have the opportunity to author a different narrative through their articulations about their own reflections, potentially altering the perception of midlife as inevitable decline.

Chapter 6 focuses on the burgeoning field of advertising as it created and preyed on anxieties about midlife decline. The readings of Pears and Sunlight soaps’ numerous campaigns highlight the implicit insidiousness of ageism even when promoting products as seemingly benign as soap. In reading a Pears ad featuring an aboriginal man, Heath's argument that “age is given the same aura of otherness that racism imposes” (181), raises compelling questions that lie beyond the scope of the project and leaves the reader wanting more.

By exploring the origins of a “midlife decline ideology,” Aging by the Book challenges readers to think more critically about the power of ageism in the present, making it an important read not only for Victorian scholars but for anyone interested in age studies.