Celebrating Women Writers

In honour of International Women's Day I thought it would be nice to share a list of my favourite female authors and which of their works I love the most. I've included authors that longtime readers of this blog will already know I adore and a few others that I don't often get the chance to speak effusively about (which I'm still not doing here, but might do in the future).

Aside from the odd foray into the Russian literary greats and my enduring love of Wilkie, for the majority I read books written by women. That's not through any particularly conscious choice because I do not let gender determine my reading habits, it's just how it's turned out. All of my favourite authors, the one's whose books I will always read, are women (except Wilkie, who is forever the odd one out).

Looking through this list I can see some common features among the novels that these authors write. Many of them have or do focus on war, and most of them are very 'person' based. I'm not really sure how to explain that, but Gardam, Dunmore, Atkinson, Vickers and Barker as examples all very much focus on people and how circumstances and situations have an impact on people. Perhaps that's the thing that grabs me, perhaps it's the intuitive and insightful exploration of real lives that draws me to these particular female writers.

Virginia Woolf

Read: To the Lighthouse

Rebecca West

Read: The Return of the Soldier

Meg Cabot

Read: The Princess Diaries

Jane Gardam

Read: The Queen of the Tambourine

Daphne du Maurier

Read: Rebecca

Dorothy L. Sayers

Read: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

Helen Dunmore

Read: The Lie

Kate Atkinson

Read: Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Salley Vickers

Read: Mr Golightly's Holiday

Alison Moore

Read: The Lighthouse

George Eliot

Read: Middlemarch

Tracey Chevalier

Read: Falling Angels

Jacqueline Wilson

Read: Bad Girls

Pat Barker

Read: Regeneration

This list is, in my opinion, the creme de la creme of women writers, but I'd love to hear who your favourites are - let me know in the comments and I'll add them to my 'to read' list!