ABSTRACT
This chapter examines aging, retirement, and legacy in the career of Dame Vera Lynn, the centenarian British singer. It explores how she has been represented since the 1970s through a temporal double exposure: as Dame Vera, an aging performer and public figure, and as Vera Lynn, the eternally youthful World War II Forces Sweetheart. Drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of chrononormativity, it examines how Lynn deployed discourses of retirement throughout her postwar career to assert creative and personal agency. It concludes by considering how cultural memory of the war has shaped her post-retirement legacy, rendering her a British “national treasure.”
