Aging and the novel

When was the first novel written in which a character ages? A novel, that is, that carefully focusses on a character who moves through youth to middle age and then into old age and finally death? This is not the Bildungsroman narrative which stops at maturity. An aging story dwells on the diminuation of power and imagination, the closing down of a personal future, the strange mix of reconciliation to, and hatred of, the world which typically comes in old age.
King Lear tells such a story perhaps. But no 18thc novel does I think. Very few, if any, 19thc novels either.
Does aging somehow fall out of the literary imagination in the epoch of realism?