Fifty-Two Year Old: Professor Timofey Pnin

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Praskovia 60

The household was looked after by Praskovia, a sturdy, sixty-year-old woman of the people with the vivacity of one a score of years younger. It was an exhilarating sight to watch her as she stood on the back porch surveying the chickens, knuckles on hips, dressed in baggy home-made shorts and a matronly blouse with rhinestones. She had nursed Alexandr and his brother when both were children in Habrin and now she was helped in her household duties by her husband, a gloomy and stolid old Cossack whose main passions in life were amateur bookbinding – a self-taught and almost pathological process that he was impelled to inflict upon any old catalogue or pulp magazine that came his way; the making of fruit liqueurs; and the killing of small forest animals.

Vladimir Nabokov · Pnin

60

Madame de Chantelle

The Reef

Edith Wharton

"She was a woman of sixty, with a figure at once young and old-fashioned..."

60

Frau Glantemeck

Goodbye to Berlin

Christopher Isherwood

"Frau Glantemeck, who is sixty years old and as ugly as a witch, had been advertising in the newspaper for a husband..."

60

Aunt Lilian

A Woman of My Age

Nina Bawden

"‘It’s just that you’re so young,’ Aunt Lilian said gently, over the immeasurable gulf that stretched between her sixty years and mine..."

60

Moll Flanders

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders

Daniel Defoe

"...everything but murder and treason had been my practice from the age of eighteen, or thereabouts, to three-score..."

60

Dolly Augusta Talbo

The Grass Harp

Truman Capote

"Dolly Augusta Talbo, white, aged 60, yellow grayish hair, thin, height 5 feet 3, green eyes, probably insane but not likely to be dangerous..."

60

Milly Sanders

A Far Cry from Kensington

Muriel Spark

"When I first knew her she was a very pretty woman of sixty, with thick shining silver hair and fine features. I think she had probably been a beauty..."

60

Edith Holland

All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West

"Dear me, how old we all are. Herbert must be sixty-eight, and I’m sixty..."