Francesca Blanch-Serrat holds a postdoctoral fellowship within ERC-funded Project WINK: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity, based at the Department of English at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She earned her doctoral degree in 2021 with a thesis on Anna Seward’s assertion of literary authority, self-presentation, and critical reception in her later-life corpus. Her current research primarily concerns women writers and older age and ageing in the long eighteenth century, and her research frameworks are gender, queer, and age, studies. She is interested in intergenerational mentorship and the figure of the elderly woman mentor, in the intersection of age, gender and singlehood (the old maid) in women writer’s self-presentation, and in the impact of age and ageing in the reception of elderly women writers.