The best fantasy tales about women over 40

I think this was the first fantasy novel that I can remember reading that featured a middle-aged woman as the hero of her own story and it came along at just the right time in my life.

Add to that, the world building is some of Bujold’s best work and Ista is a marvelous character. This is someone who’s led a terrible sheltered life in many respects, some of it under a terrible curse, and yet here she is, planning and carrying out her own rescue.

The plot gives her lots of opportunity to grow as a character, providing a still comparatively rare depiction of a woman coming into her own at midlife in a fantasy genre often full of “blokes in cloaks.”

In a genre full of stories of almost infinite variety, this is one that caught my eye.

A middle-aged female professor of mathematics goes on a quest with her cat to track down a former student who is the only one who can save their world from destruction. Sounds cozy, doesn’t it? Except for the world-ending part.

And the fact that Vellitt’s path lies straight through a dreamscape out of the Lovecraftian mythos in this critique/homage to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. But you don’t have to have read the latter to enjoy the journey.

Vellitt is a marvelous character, the world-building is brilliant and the cat is the perfect addition that helps set the tone for a new and different kind of quest fantasy.

General Turyin Mulaghesh is on the brink of retiring to her long dreamt of remote island post where she can lay around on a beach, getting happily drunk with a beautiful young man or two and do as little as possible.

But she’s a legendary hero of the Saypuri Republic, or perhaps a war criminal, depending on which side of the many battles that she’s fought you were on. So instead, she gets pushed into one last mission, one that has her confronting the deeds of her past and, possibly, getting a shot at redemption.

She is cynical and sweary and has done terrible things, as well as good ones and, at least for me, is one of the most relatable older women in fantasy. 

Larque is an unusual and sympathetic protagonist. She’s a wife, mother, and moderately successful businesswoman, but thinks of herself as a failed artist.

She also has the ability to create doppelgangers, temporary doubles of the people in her life. But this time, they’re a lot less temporary. Sky is her ten-year-old self, rebellious and contemptuous of the choices her adult self has made, and Lark is a young gay man dealing with life in the early 1990s.

And Larque is both of them, as well as herself and the menacing Virtuous Woman who lurks in the background, waiting for her chance to take over Larque’s life. It makes for a wild midlife crisis in which Larque has to decide who she wants to be and what she wants for her creations.

How can I not wrap up this list with my latest discovery, namely a novel about a devout Muslim female pirate who successfully retires, raises a family…and gets pulled back into her former life for one last adventure?

It’s got a swashbuckling middle-aged heroine, adventure, a fantasy heist, a chosen family, and splendid worldbuilding so really, what more could I ask for from a book that I didn’t write? I should note that unlike the other books I’ve included, this one is the first book in a trilogy, so if you like it, there’s more ahead!