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Nonagenarian turns the page

London: A raunchy novel with a dauntless heroine has transformed the lives of a 93-year-old author and three of her friends who were living in nursing homes in the U.K.

Pushed by her daughter-in-law, who found the manuscript and could not put it down, Lorna Page has become one of the oldest debut writers on record, with equally unusual social results.

Suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales of A Dangerous Weakness, a feminist thriller set in the Alps, Ms. Page has traded her one-bedroom flat in Surrey for a big, detached country house, and invited her contemporaries to move in.

“Care homes can be such miserable places. You sit there all day staring out the window with no one to talk to,” she said. “I thought it would be lovely to give a home and family life to one or two people who would otherwise be sitting around there. It’s nice for me too because at my age it’s handy to have someone to live with. Now every book that sells will help towards making a home for someone.” Ms. Page has been writing since she first learned to hold a pencil as a child in the Devon port of Bideford, but seldom ventured publicly beyond poems and magazine articles. She wrote A Dangerous Weakness three years ago, but put it in a suitcase and made no attempt to find a publisher until her daughter-in-law told her: “This is fantastic. It’s bound to sell.”

The book has been published in both hardback and paperback. Ms. Page, who taught the Morse code to the Air Training Corps during the Second World War, is working on a sequel collection of short stories.

The grandmother of two, whose name was previously known to publishing only as one of 55 pseudonyms of the veteran pulp writer, 80-year-old Donald S. Rowland, said: “I’ve always written. It seems I’ve been writing for a hundred years.” This will be true in less than seven years time, particularly as Ms. Page said that her housing plan had given her a new lease of life.

“I started asking people if they wanted to move out of their care homes and live with me and I’ve had dozens of offers. They are queueing up,” she said. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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Nonagenarian turns the page

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