12 women who were far from ‘overnight successes’

Julia Child, the television chef who raised the culinary skills of millions of Americans from the 1960s to the 1990s, only started learning to cook when she was 37. She didn’t become well known until her late 40s.

When her charismatic husband committed suicide, housewife Katherine Graham took over the reins at her family-owned newspaper. She was 46. Through its superb coverage of events such as the Watergate scandal, Graham turned The Washington Post into an opinion-making powerhouse.

43-year-old Ruth Handler had been running a small toy company for over a decade when she premiered the ‘Barbie’ doll (named after her daughter) at the American Toy Fair. At a time when dolls resembled little girls, the adult-looking Barbie was an instant success. Her company’s na

Betty Friedan was fired from her job as a journalist when she became pregnant with her second child. Life was hard as a freelancer, but a survey she did of her Smith College classmates 15 years after graduation led to the writing, at 42, of her landmark The Feminine Mystique.

Laura Ingles Wilder became a newspaper columnist in her 40s, but did not publish her first novel in the Little House series until her mid-60s.

Elizabeth Jolley, the celebrated English-born Australian writer, waited until she was almost 60 to publish her first novel. Mary Wesley wrote her first work of adult fiction, Jumping The Queue, at 70.

Mary Baker Eddy was not young when she wrote the spiritual classic Science and Health. She was 87 when she launched the famous Christian Science Monitor magazine.

Mary Somerville, who helped make science a popular subject in the Victorian era, was still writing influential textbooks in her late 80s. The legendary travel writer Lesley Blanch, who died in 2010, continued writing into her 100s.

Grandma Moses had ten children, five of whom died in childbirth. In her 70s she took up painting. A New York art collector saw her work and included her in an exhibition of ‘American unknowns’. She became a celebrated artist, and kept painting up to her death at 101.

Artist Louise Bourgeois had a huge installation in the Tate Modern Museum in London at 88, and enjoyed a retrospective of her work there at 96.

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