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Reinventing Retirement

To the Editor:

Most of the respondents to Carolyn Heilbrun’s “Guest Column: From Re-
reading to Reading” (119 [2004]: 211–17) seem generally to accept her rather 
dismal view of what is and is not possible in retirement. I disagree. Two of the 
fine scholars (and teachers) who were my dear friends and mentors did some 
of their best work in their eighties and nineties. One of these was John C. 
Pope, who was nearing ninety when those of us attending the Medieval Acad-
emy meeting agreed that his latest article on an Old English poem was the 
model of what a scholarly article ought to be; he had just mailed off another 
important contribution when he died, very suddenly, at ninety-three. Another 
was Ruth J. Dean, whose prizewinning masterwork, Anglo-Norman Litera-
ture: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, was published about three years be-
fore she died, at the age of one hundred.

I cannot compare myself with such examples, but at least I have com-
pleted (and published) four books since my retirement, and I have finished 
work on another, which I hope will see publication soon—when my collabo-
rators have finished their share. I have, to be sure, somewhat shifted my area 
of concentration since I stopped teaching, and I have been spending my time 
on editing and working with medieval culinary records rather than literature 
in the more usual sense. Almost all my published articles in recent years have 
been on culinary matters, but I made a start on this twenty-five years ago, and 
it can’t be said to be a new area for me.

At seventy-six, I am slowing down, and I spend a larger part of my time 
rereading novels (most recently, all of Jane Austen and Emma Lathen, one of my 
favorite writers of whodunits), but I am apt to feel guilty of slacking off when I 
do this in daylight hours.

Constance B. Hieatt
Essex, CT

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