A rough inventory of my bookcase shows that many of the books I read, fall in love with, and buy a copy to keep, and read over an over again, are written by women.
The pages are falling out of my copies of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series and Helen Cresswell’s Bagthorpe family books due to the wear and tear of multiple re-reads. I’ve covered Mary’s Stewart’s Merlin series with contact to make them more durable. ’m on my second set of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond series, and third copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. When I’m in need of serious relaxation, I read to LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and the Little Princess and Edith Nesbit’s Bastable family. I return again and again to Robin Hobb’s Live Ship and Assassin series, Connie Willis’ time traveling historians, Robin McKinley’s Blue Sword, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Eagle of the Ninth and Sheri Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country. My guilty re-reading secrets include Jean Auel’s Earths Children series and Sharon Shinn’s Samarian Angels.
Many of the authors I’ve discovered or rediscovered in the last year and really enjoyed are women too: Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall lead me to her earlier novels and autobiography, Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I reignited my affection for regency romances, Gail Carriger introduced me to Steam Punk. I wanted to make friends with Eva Ibbottson’s generous heroines,.Scenes from Kate Atkinson’s When Will there be Good News were so vivid as to give me nightmares,.PD James led me back to the police procedural and Barbara Vine has given me an appreciation of the House of Lords I did not anticipate.
Among the (admittedly limited) non fiction collection on my bookshelf, female authors (and subjects) are prominent. Biographies of women by Alison Plowdon, Antonia Fraser and Anne Somerset line up. My copy of Virgnia Woolf's A Room of Ones Own is as worn as Helen Cresswell’s Absolute Zero.
This is not to say that I do not enjoy books written by men. Douglas Adams and John Irving are among my enduring favorites, and occupy space on my bookshelf, as does William Dalrymple. Recently I’ve been enchanted by Colm Toibin’s writing, and having discovered Michael Robotham’s novels, narrated by cascading characters, I have consumed three in the space of a week. Long before I achieved a completely mediocre score in the Guardian’s VS Naipul test, I had concluded that gender was no indication of either sentimentality or quality in literature. Nevertheless, the majority of the writers who have spoken loudly and insistently enough to me to part me from my money and a cause a serious investment of reading time over the years have been women.
And so, combining my personal challenge to read more widely and outside my comfort zone, and the Readit2011 theme for May: Grrlpower: a celebration of women, was a challenge in itself. I decided to step out side my natural reading habitat of fiction, and try a biography of a woman written by a man and personal memoir written by a woman. To round it off, I stepped back to fiction, written by a man, but with a female main character.
The first book, Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor, by Hugo Vickers, was perhaps not such a giant step from my comfort zone. Most of the Historical Biography I read concerns royal (or closely associated) women. I did writer about this book at greater length a few weeks ago, but in summary: Hugo Vickers Vickers writes with sympathy for the Duchess of Windsor, in a book that is as much the story of Vickers’ fascination with the royalty, as that of the decline and death of the Duchess of Windsor. Beginning in 1972 with the Duke’s death, and ending with an account of the auction of some of the Windsor’s remaining household items in 1998, Vickers recounts his involvement, and quotes from his own diaries, creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy. I must admit to enjoying this book, and Vicker’s style immensly, with my tongue firmly in my cheek .
Secondly I read Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Spending time with her family after her marriage ends (her husband leaves her for a man he meets on gay.com) and she’s injured in a car crash, Janzen mulls over her Mennonite upbringing. Plain and simple clothes, strange food, and a ban on dancing and participating in the school play were hard to endure as a child, but Janzen also acknowledges the skills that she has as a result – her ability to cook for a large group at the drop of a hat, and the innate goodness of her mother, who I think is the real star of this book. I found Janzen’s style a rather muddled, and would have enjoyed the book more if it had been more tightly edited, but it is very readable.
Finally, I returned to fiction with Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays is Missing. Thursday Next, (not the real one, but the written one, who plays the part of the real Thursday Next in the novels loosely based upon her outworld life) Jurisfiction’s least effective agent, begins to suspect some one wants something covered up when she is asked to investigate (but not too thoroughly) and inter-genre taxi accident. Meanwhile, the real Thursday Next is missing, a genre war is brewing, and readership is falling alarmingly. Assisted by a steam powered butler, Thursday (the “written” one) attempts to work out what is happening. The story is as inventive and convoluted as Fforde’s earlier Thursday Next/bookworld novels, and just as enjoyable. In addition to the story, I particularly enjoyed the map showing the relative positions of different genres with the Isle of fiction.
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