It is perhaps received wisdom that new writers of fiction over the age of about 40 don't have a hope of publication, at least by the major houses . This belief seems to be supported by the total absence of any major prize for a writer under that age and often much younger than that. There are no publishers specialising in the works of older writers, at least by new older writers. Middle or old age is only a virtue on the blurb on the cover if the author has been publishing for ages and has a string of awards to his / her name.   
   If this is true then I suspect at the root of it is good old fashioned ageism. The publishing industry, like the rest of the media, seems obsessed with youth. In a more charitable mood I would like to believe it is because publishers and agents like to invest in long term relationships with their authors whom they hope to nurture to a point where they will bring a decent return. A writer in his or her sixties may not live long enough to see that return.
  My charitable mood isn't very charitable and doesn't last very long. I suspect the received wisdom is that a writer who hasn't made a serious commitment before the age when most people have settled down to a mortgage and a steady job isn't ever going to be much good.
  Perhaps it has something to do with what Muriel Gray described as Rural Teacher Syndrome in her address before the announcement of the Organge Prize in 2007. It seems she complained of the mediocrity of most of the novels that were submitted. Most of them, she said, were barely disguised autobiographies about falied marriages, lost babies and / or dead-end careers. She mourned the "inability to translate one's own experience into something larger, stronger and frankly more interesting than the life which produced it."
  While I applaud the need for novels that transcend the author's own experience, her views seem to beg a number of questions. Is this particular kind of mediocrity confined only to female writers? Or do male authors have their own types of ordinariness? Blood on the board room floor? If it is as hard to get published as some people claim, why are these things produced at all?  
  Getting back to my theme of older writers and the discrimination they face, I wonder if there might be a tendency for people who start writing later in life (after  marriage children and careers perhaps) to look back on and somehow try to make amends or understand what the hell went wrong through the act of writing fiction.
  If - and it seems to me a big if - older writers are indeed so inclined then they will indeed contribute to their own obscurity relative to their younger counterparts. I doubt that is a sufficient explanation, but it may be true at least in part. The rest I suspect may be ageism. I for one refuse to accept the ageist stereotype that all that is left in old age is history and regret.