Julia first wrote about the satisfactions of old age when she was not yet 50. In an article about Cicero's De Senectute in the Spectator, she described it as a time of narrowed perspectives: ‘long before we receive such telling notice [from ‘dim sight, dull hearing, weakened powers of locomotion and failing memory’] that our mansion here is getting out of repair, and must be shortly abandoned, we have parted with some of the attractiveness and interest of life. We have lost its store of infinite possibility’. There were, however, compensations. Old age was a time for reflection, for looking back at the defeats of middle age with less emotion and more understanding. ‘Some pain’, she wrote, ‘never loses its painfulness’, but time had more power to transmute the impact of past errors than we expect. Age could also be ‘vivid, intense, crowded with interest and hope’. Like childhood, it was a time of self-definition. The serenity of Julia's reflections on old age rested on her confidence in the ‘almost audible promise’ of a future life. ‘As the windows are darkened, and the grasshopper become a burden, and as desire failed, have we not all witnessed a revelation of new possibilities within a character long familiar, rendering the notion that it shall cease to be […] impossible?’

As she anticipated, Julia enjoyed her final years. ‘Age’, as she wrote to Henrietta Litchfield, ‘has all the advantage in point of happiness.’ Her hearing steadily deteriorated, she underwent an operation for cancer, she worried that her eyesight was failing and could no longer work long hours, but she was content in her domestic life, her friendships with younger women and her correspondence with a varied circle. Above all, she enjoyed thinking back to the great writers and teachers she had known as well as looking forward to reunion with those she had loved. As she told Alfred Benn the year before she died, she was ready to ‘rise from the banquet a satisfied guest’, if only she could first finish the book she was writing. She had not expected to be quite so busy in her last decade.