Here’s a challenge for you: find a book jacket that features an image of a woman over 40.

My own hunt – as yet unsuccessful – was prompted by the actor and novelist Barbara Ewing, whose novel about a drama-school reunion, The Actresses, has just been reissued. Ewing says she cried when she first saw the cover of the 1997 edition – although it focuses on women over 50, the jacket image was a close up of a young woman’s face. This time around, she and publisher Head of Zeus have gone for an elegant photograph of a silver-haired woman that measures up perfectly to the book’s protagonists. But Ewing says bookshops aren’t interested.

Measuring up ... the new edition of Barbara Ewing’s The Actresses.

It seems the book world doesn’t think readers want to see women of a certain age on their novels – even if that is precisely what the books are about. Take a look at some literary novels about older women – Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, Carol Shields’ Unless – and you’ll see a lighthouse, two children wearing fairy wings, a young couple in a car and a child standing on her head.

What about novels with a more commercial mind? Elizabeth Buchan’s Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, Allison Pearson’s How Hard Can It Be? and Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood have plenty of older women inside their pages. But on the front there’s a sketch of a couple of glasses of wine on the table, a falling silhouette of a female and two joyous young women. Prue Leith’s The Choral Society features the disembodied legs of three women, which sounds like progress. But according to the blurb they’re all in their 50s. Let’s just say their legs look ... amazing.

The Actresses aside, I can’t find a single novel that features an older-looking woman on its cover. Ewing’s novel was forged from her sorrow at the way parts dry up for women actors over 50 – an issue that is still very much alive today. As Hilary Mantel says, women over 50 are the invisible generation.

Publishers who avoid older women on book jackets and booksellers who turn up their noses at the new edition of Ewing’s novel are playing into this narrative – and making a big mistake. Women, and in particular older women, have always made up a disproportionate amount of readers. Why not acknowledge that they do, in fact, have faces, after all?