The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and Late Call share a number of things. In both, Wilson imagines himself into the mind, body and predicament of a woman. Both women suffer from loss of status, which prompts a breakdown and, later, a renewal. Meg Eliot is to brood about ‘Lonely old women in their hundreds … old women smiling inanely from frightened, timid eyes; old women leering crazily from clownish painted faces; old women smiling and nodding, with cracked shoes and skirts done up with safety pins; square faced, bobbed haired old fighters for women's rights reduced to depressive silence; and bird-eyed, gaunt old socialite women (Meg Eliots these) chattering their manic nonsense’ (p. 191). Meg's nightmare of superannuated old ladies is precisely shared with Sylvia in the later novel. Both women similarly envision ‘old Jewesses packed into cattle trucks’ (MME 191, LC 155) as the ultimate picture of their own superannuation. And both women also ponder the same quizgame, Meg on the radio, Sylvia in the newspaper, entailing a lifeboat with a limited number of places. In both games the elderly woman is pitched over the side first – ‘she is not frankly going to be of much use to the world’ (MME 191, LC 55).

The breakdowns of Bernard and Gerald were somewhat cushioned by wealth and position. Gerald's money cut him off from his world and he was often able to buy himself out of trouble and involvement. His attempt to maintain a liberal consensus in his editorial job by placating his enemy Professor Clun happened over luncheon at his old club, the Athenaeum. This notably failed. It was the meretricious appearances of Gerald's son on the ‘democratic’ television that finally tempered Clun's animosity. If Gerald is in any sense an amiable ‘dodo’, Wilson chooses not to remind him of this through any economic misfortune.

Yet Wilson is essentially a novelist of the decentred imagination and, since Meg and Sylvia's decentrings are more radical, these novels are to that degree more powerful. In both The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot and Late Call he looks directly at the psychological effects of loss of caste and status, and within the sex that starts at a disadvantage, the ‘poor bitch-sex that had been for ever pushed around by brute force’ (NLM 344). These heroines are first of all decentred by virtue of being women.