As in real life, many novels feature couples consisting of a younger woman and a man older than she is. So it’s refreshingly different when the age gap goes in the opposite gender direction.

I most recently experienced this last week when reading Elin Hilderbrand’s excellent early-career novel Barefoot, which includes a man in his early 20s who has an affair with a woman in her early 30s during a summer in Nantucket, Massachusetts. The relationship works for multiple reasons, even as both characters’ life situations are rather complicated.

One of the best-known examples of this “genre” is Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which stars a divorced 42-year-old woman who finds romance during a Jamaica vacation with a man half her age.

Three-quarters of a century earlier, Colette offered a similar 40-something/20-something dynamic in Cheri — which was followed by The Last of Cheri sequel.

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader features a 36-year-old woman (a former Nazi guard) and a 15-year-old teen boy. As you can imagine, things get rather fraught personally and politically.

Then there’s Harold and Maude — released as a movie and a Colin Higgins-written novelization of that movie at roughly the same time. In the film, which became a cult classic, Harold is about 20 and Maude is 79, with the “hook” that Maude has a more youthful personality and sunnier outlook on life than the morbid Harold.

Another novel lesser known than its film version is Charles Webb’s The Graduate, in which Benjamin has an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father’s business partner.

There are obviously many examples in fiction of a woman being only a modest number of years older than the man with whom she is romantically involved. For instance, the time-traveling Claire is Jamie’s senior by about five years in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books.

Of course, novels with an older man and a younger woman can also work, but it depends. One reason I found Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead kind of off-putting was because its elderly pastor was so much older than his wife. (He was sort of a fictional religious version of celebrities such as The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger and football coach Bill Belichick, who are both in relationships with much-younger women.) But somehow the romance between Jane Eyre and the two-decades-older Edward Rochester felt right — partly because Jane was emotionally and intellectually very mature for her age in Charlotte Bronte’s novel.

We will not mention what goes on in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita…

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “All those flowers are white? Trump’s anti-DEI efforts have gone too far.”

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…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a confusing proposed school district budget — is here.