This article is available open access through the publisher’s website through the link below. Copyright @ 2011 The Author.Since the 1970s, concern with questions of reception within literary studies has been, at best, sporadic. This essay presents early insights from a pioneering research study, conducted in 2009–10, involving a rehabilitated form of reader-response analysis. Working with 80 volunteers (of average age 70), the study used fiction to create a space of critical reflection on the changing experience of aging. Volunteers were recruited from the Universities of the Third Age, a network of self-help cooperatives for older people: over the course of a year, they read and reflected on a series of fictional texts. This essay focuses on the responses of older women readers to one particular novel, Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. Setting their varied and thought-provoking responses within the changing context of contemporary age-culture, the essay highlights some of the neglected possibilities of reader-response as a mode of analysis capable of shedding significant new light on the gendered experience of aging
