Jane Juska: late literary bloomer who broke taboo of sex and the older woman

A personals ad in the 1990s led to a host of sexual experiences, in her sixties, and an offer from a publisher which launched her writing career

The retired teacher became a writer after ending a 30-year hiatus in her sex life (Rex)

“Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.”

So began the personal ad that Jane Juska, a retired English teacher living in Berkeley, California, placed in The New York Review of Books in 1999. Perhaps to reassure more timid respondents, her offer continued, “If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

The trysts that followed became the stuff of her widely read 2003 memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. The subject of national attention if not titillation in the US, Juska became a go-to interpreter of later-life desire, entertaining and perhaps inspiring readers with her spicy spirit.

​A divorcée, Juska, who has died aged 84, said she was inspired to take out the personal ad by Eric Rohmer’s 1998 film Autumn Tale, in which a woman turns to the newspaper to seek a companion for her middle-aged friend.

At the time, Juska estimated she had gone 30 years without sex, a drought due neither to lack of interest nor of effort on the dating scene.

“A deep-seated emotion – desire – unseated itself, rose up and began to knock insistently at the door of my sexuality,” The San Francisco Chronicle quoted her as writing later. “I wanted to invite a man into my life. The problem was that, despite senior hikes, senior birdwatching, senior mixers, even a couple of senior dances at a church the doors of which I had not darkened in over 50 years, I couldn’t find one.”

Tired of waiting, she turned to The New York Review of Books, a venue that she hoped might attract intellectual men who shared her love of literature. The eminent literary review proved fertile ground: Juska reported receiving 63 replies from men ranging in age from 85 to 32 – but “a very old 32,” she told CBS News.

Some respondents were classier than others. One mailed a picture of himself wearing sunglasses and nothing else. Juska did not reply.

The letters yielded eight or nine dates which in turn led to five sexual encounters, she said. Her suitors’ identities, if not their anatomy or habits, were safe with Juska; in her memoir, she changed their names and referred to them by such titles as Danny the Priest, Jonah the Thief, Robert the Liar, Sidney the Peculiar and Graham the Younger.

Like any dater, she had experiences running from the sublime to the less-than-sublime. In the latter category was Jonah, an eighty-something, who travelled from the East Coast for their rendezvous at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, which ended with Jonah stealing Juska’s champagne flutes and silk pyjama pants.

At least twice, she said, her heart was broken. “And I would like to say that that experience is no easier at 67 than it is at 17,” she told a radio station in the US. “It’s just at 67, one has less time to get over it.”

A Round-Heeled Woman – the title referred to the old-fashioned name for a woman easily tipped into the horizontal position – became a one-woman play by Jane Prowse and starring Sharon Gless, performed in San Francisco, Miami and London.

Graphic though it was the story was about more than mere carnal pleasure, much in the same way, as one book reviewer put it, that “Moby-Dick is about far more than a madman’s search for a whale.”

Juska had revealed what too many people were missing.

She told Canada’s National Post newspaper: “I have a girl friend in the Midwest who said to me, ‘I want to hear all about the book, but I don’t want to hear about the sex’.” She added: “I think that’s because sex is a sad reminder to some people that they’ve been without it for so long.”

Born Jane Murbach in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Juska was raised in Archbold, a small town in Ohio. Her father was a doctor, and her mother was a homemaker.

Juska graduated in English from the University of Michigan in 1955. Her most recent book was a novel, Mrs Bennet Has Her Say was inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

​Juska moved to California in the early 1970s after divorcing from her husband, Joe Juska, whom she had married at a young age, and with whom she said she had little emotional connection. “The loneliest I have ever been was when I was married,” she once told The New York Times.

She spent much of her career in California, teaching at San Quentin prison as well as in schools as she raised her son, Andy.

Besides her son – whose permission she sought before placing the ad but who, she joked, had “no intention of reading the book” – she is survived by a sister and two granddaughters.

Juska struggled at times with obesity and addiction, which she discussed in her writing as candidly as she discussed her romantic life. In 2006 she published Unaccompanied Women, a sequel to Round-Heeled Woman. In it she expressed her sadness when Graham, a thirty-something, married a younger lover.

“I am moved to tears with longing and love for this man,” she confessed, “with despair and regret for what cannot be.”

What she did not regret, she said, was having taken out the personal ad. In fact, she wished she had done it years earlier. And for those who wondered, she insisted that her allusion to Trollope, the English Victorian novelist, was not a pun.

Jane Juska, born 7 March 1933, died 24 October 2017

© The Washington Post