At an age when most women enjoy the pleasure of being grandmothers or simply retirement, Adriana Iliescu, 67, says that the birth of her daughter Eliza Maria Bogdana, who will celebrate her first birthday on Monday, has given her a new lease of life.

She seems unconcerned by the worldwide controversy she provoked when she gave birth to her daughter, conceived through IVF, last year, becoming the oldest single mother in the world.

We meet in her tiny two-room apartment in a nondescript block in western Bucharest , still redolent of the bleak, Communist-era architecture that characterises most of the Romanian capital.

With her dark brown hair in a bun, wearing elegant mauve suede boots and a pink knee-length skirt, Ms Iliescu says she has achieved her mission in life: to give birth to her child. The tiny Eliza was sent by God, says her mother.

On this mid-January evening, she is busy planning the menu for her daughter's first birthday party on Monday. A tall Christmas tree stands at the entrance to the house, a gift from a local television channel, who will also be present for Monday's celebration.

Her wrinkled face lights up as she dangles a small rag doll that recites The Lord's Prayer in front of her baby.

"It's not for now. I'm only showing it to her. I'll give it to her to play with when she is a bit older and she can understand the meaning of the words," she says, putting the toy back on a shelf, alongside a dozen other dolls, bought over previous decades while she dreamed of one day having a baby girl of her own.

She sits by a cot in what will be Eliza's room, where a tall bookcase is filled with classic literature and poetry. She points to a rack of tiny dresses, all delicate in colour and texture, and a child-sized traditional Romanian folk costume.

"I want to get into the Guinness Book of World Records," Ms Iliescu says, showing a certificate attesting that she - born on 31 May, 1938 - was 66 years and 230 days old when she gave birth to Eliza at the Panait Sirbu Hospital in Bucharest on 16 January, 2005, following in vitro fertilisation.

The certificate is testament to the controversy prompted when the Romanian media accused her of causing an ethical-medical crisis. "In the US the medical procedure would have been considered a criminal action because, among other reasons, Ms Iliescu is a single mother", one of the Romanian dailies wrote at the time.

Unlike in most European countries, in post-communist Romania there is no law regulating artificial reproduction. The ethical controversy in Ms Iliescu's case is linked to her age and to her status as a single mother.

She brushes those considerations aside, saying that her year with Eliza has given her a miraculous strength: "It is as if I had died and been reincarnated.

"There is an esoteric theory which says that a baby's soul chooses her mother. I am much stronger, mentally and physically, now."

"I am only sad for my daughter that I have lost the beauty of my youth," she says.

After her divorce, she never remarried, in spite of her hope to do so. The subject seems to strike a painful note but she treats it philosophically. "There are four important stages in life: birth, baptism, marriage and death... The wish to have a family has always been strong, but one salvages what one can," she laments. Why didn't she have a child as a single mother when she was younger? "I didn't want to have a child in the atheistic regime," she says of Communist-era Romania , where women were encouraged to become "hero mothers", and abortions were banned in a bid to increase the population under the late dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She admits that she had a therapeutic abortion in 1958, because of a family history of tuberculosis.

As she speaks, she cocks an ear to listen to the contented baby noises coming from the adjoining room, where Eliza is supervised by her nanny Mariana, 62, whose daughter is a nurse at the hospital where Eliza was born. Eliza is also called Maria, after the Virgin Mary, and Bogdana, after Bogdan Marinescu, the doctor who helped Ms Iliescu in her bold enterprise.

"She was really tiny when she was born. [But] she was graded nine on a scale of ten, which is very high for a Caesarean section [baby]," Adriana says, her face glowing with obvious pride. The baby now weighs 22lb. "She communicates, she understands, she explores the world around her, she looks up at me and calls me Mama."

Ms Iliescu has the girl's future all figured out: "I'll make her a teacher, like myself and my mother." Although she is now a pensioner, Ms Iliescu has been teaching literature at a private college in Bucharest three days a week, where she also gives seminars.

When she is older, Eliza will be able to discover herself in her ambitious mother's books, and in references to her professional accomplishments. Ms Iliescu wrote two novels, long before she dreamed she would have a daughter. In both books, the main character is a blue-eyed girl. "And at long last God has given me my blue-eyed girl," she says.

Monday's party will also include Petrisor, a three-year-old boy from the same neighbourhood and Eliza's first friend. The menu is elaborate, comprising Romanian specialities, despite Ms Iliescu's tight budget. Her talent for cooking is another thing Ms Iliescu hopes Eliza will inherit.

She is confident about her plans for Eliza's future education: "I want to send her to the Children's Palace, to learn to play the piano, to dance folk dances, to use the computer, and to practise sports."

She says of herself that she is a woman "who catches the last train", and who plans to continue her career to provide for Eliza and for herself. She has registered for a three-year grant at her university, based on a project about national and European identity. "If the grant is approved," she smiles, "I'll have money to build a playhouse for Eliza at our family home in the countryside."