Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers lands the punchline with a sly bait-and-switch: she starts in the register of social correction, then flips it into a celebration of female permanence. The phrase "advanced young woman" carries the period's anxious code for a woman who reads too much, thinks too quickly, votes, works, wants. In polite society, "advanced" was never neutral; it was a warning label. By pairing it with "time and trouble", Sayers mimics the smug certainty of a culture that believes youthful rebellion is a phase curable by exhaustion, marriage, or money.

Then she detonates the second clause. An "advanced old woman" is not merely a young radical who refused to be chastened; she's someone for whom chastening has failed repeatedly. Age, in this framing, doesn't soften her into palatability; it hardens her into sovereignty. "Uncontrollable by any earthly force" is hyperbole, but it's strategic hyperbole: the mock-epic tone lifts what would be dismissed as stubbornness into a kind of moral physics. Once a woman has survived the system's corrective rituals, the system loses leverage. Shame stops working. Social fear stops working. Even the threat of being "difficult" becomes irrelevant because difficulty is no longer a cost; it's an identity.

Context matters: Sayers wrote in an era when women's public autonomy was still treated as a social experiment with an expiration date. The subtext is equal parts warning and wish. If you keep trying to tame women with consequence, you may succeed briefly. If you fail until they get older, you create something freer than you intended: a person past negotiation, past appeasement, past asking permission.