Why Fantasy Needs More Protagonists Like Prudence Hartwell

If you survey the landscape of fantasy fiction — particularly the cozy corner of it, which I inhabit — you find that most protagonists share certain qualities. They are young. They are discovering their power. They are setting out. The whole grammar of fantasy storytelling is structured around beginning: the farmboy, the apprentice, the girl who doesn't yet know what she is.

This makes a certain structural sense. The hero's journey, as Campbell described it, begins with a call and ends with a return. That arc maps cleanly onto young adulthood. There's a reason the coming-of-age story and the fantasy epic evolved together, and why YA fantasy became such a dominant publishing category.

But it leaves a gap — an enormous gap — in the kinds of stories fantasy can tell.

The Unrepresented Reader

I started writing Prudence Hartwell's story because I noticed something in my reading: when I recommended cozy fantasy to readers over fifty — and I do this often, because the genre has a lot to offer people who are tired of darkness — the most common response was a kind of wistful disconnect. I love these books, but I don't see myself in them. Not a complaint, exactly. More of an observation about absence.

The readers who love cozy fantasy most — who buy the most copies, who press them into friends' hands, who build communities around them — are not necessarily young. Many of them have already done the thing the protagonists are just beginning to do. They've had careers, raised children, lost people, changed direction. The adventure of becoming is behind them. What they're looking for is a different kind of adventure: the adventure of continuing.

What an Older Protagonist Knows

Prudence Hartwell is sixty-two years old when The Cartographer of Unseen Roads begins. She is a retired cartographer, recently widowed, who has spent her life making maps for other people's journeys. She is, in her own estimation, done with adventures. This is important: the novel doesn't treat her age as a deficiency to be overcome. It treats her age as the source of her particular competence.

What Prudence knows, at sixty-two, that no twenty-year-old protagonist can know: the shape of a long life. She has made mistakes and lived with them. She has loved people and lost them. She has been disappointed by the world and found ways to remain curious about it anyway. When the magic in Ashenvale begins to reveal itself, she approaches it with the patient attention of someone who has been paying attention for decades. That is a different kind of hero — and, I would argue, a more interesting one in many ways.

Books That Do This Well

The tradition is thin but not absent. Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric & Desdemona series features a middle-aged demon-possessed sorcerer navigating a world that doesn't always know what to do with her. Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, while age-ambiguous, has an older-feeling sensibility in its protagonist's patient, methodical relationship with his circumstances. The Discworld novels — particularly those following Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg — are fundamentally about what it means to be a woman of a certain age with power and knowledge and the wisdom to know how to use them.

Madeleine E. Robins's Sarah Tolerance mysteries feature a protagonist in her thirties who feels decades older — a woman navigating a difficult world with hard-won competence and a refusal to be diminished. Closer to the spirit of what I'm reaching for.

The Adventure of Continuation

What I wanted to write, with Prudence, was a fantasy about what it means to discover that you're not done — that the map of your life still has unmarked territories, that belonging is something you can find at sixty-two as readily as at twenty, that old magic doesn't care about age. The adventure in The Cartographer of Unseen Roads is quieter than a quest. It is the adventure of a woman finding out that the world still has claims on her, and deciding, with her eyes open, to answer them.