Dataset used for the analyses in the research article "Shuffling Softly, Sighing Deeply: A Digital Inquiry into Representations of Older Men and Women in Literature for Different Ages" submitted to the journal Social Sciences. Data was obtained using a syntactic parser developed in collaboration with TEXTUA, the Text Mining Centre of the University of Antwerp. For copyright reasons, part of the data, which contains full sentences from the texts, was removed. However, the resulting dataset is sufficient to replicate the study. The filenames are formatted as follows: age of the intended reader_AUTHOR_book title_year_character's age_gender_word type.json The following word types associated with relevant characters were extracted from the texts: 1: verbs 2: possessions 3: attributive adjectives 4: predicative adjectives