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The Burning Chambers by Kate Mosse (£5.99, Pan) is out now 99. Brontë proved that what matters in a writer is imagination, not personal experience – that it’s the ability to tell a story, to create imagined worlds, that makes a writer – for all this passion came from the pen of a solitary young woman who rarely left her home in Haworth, Yorkshire. It’s a story of violence and obsession it’s a ghost story or it’s a celebration of the timelessness of the land and the power of nature or it’s an attack on the Victorian hypocrisies of race, sex, marriage and class. That novel, for me, is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. “It’s not a question of having a ‘favourite’ novelist, but rather about someone having written a book that means more than any other. Emily Brontë (1818-1848) by author and Women’s Prize for Fiction co-founder, Kate Mosse But, despite her comfortable background and connections, she was unafraid of tackling the plight of the working classes – which made her less than popular with Victorian critics. That’s Mrs Gaskell to you… The author of Cranford (1851-53), North And South (1855) and Wives And Daughters (1865), Gaskell counted Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë among her friends and admirers (she wrote the latter’s biography – The Life Of Charlotte Brontë– in 1857). We’re on Rebecca’s side… Put that together with some of the world’s most elegant and creepy short stories ( The Birds (1963) and 1973’s Don’t Look Now) and her other books which include Jamaica Inn (1936) and My Cousin Rachel (1951) and there’s no arguing that Du Maurier is one of literature’s finest names. While the anonymous narrator may put the wet in blanket, she’s entertainingly tormented by the most dastardly twosome in modern fiction: Mrs Danvers, the creepy housekeeper, and Maxim de Winter, the world’s most self-absorbed husband. If ever you need the very definition of a page-turner, it’s Rebecca (1938). With a natural-born ability to conjure up childhood alienation, oddbods, loners and small-town frustration, her 1940 novel The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter remains an American classic with the capacity to collapse your heart. “The heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of another’s fire…” Read Georgia-born McCullers at the right age and you’ll end up naming firstborns after her. Her most enduring work, Evelina (1778), is both a guide to 18th century society and a subversion of it. Fanny Burney (1752-1840)ĪKA the woman who influenced Jane Austen (a line from her 1782 novel Cecilia even inspired the title for that little-known work Pride And Prejudice)… Creating ‘scribblings’ from the age of 10, Burney wrote novels, plays, journals, letters and one biography, making a name for herself as a satirist of the aristocracy. Feted by her contemporaries, both her books pioneered the exploration of race identity and identification in America and are astonishing in their prescience.
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Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her.” The daughter of a white Danish mother and a black West Indian father, Chicago-born Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), cemented her position as part of the Harlem Renaissance. “She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. The Split by Sharon Bolton (£12.99, Orion) is out 105. Charlotte Brontë remains the undisputed queen of the romantic thriller.” Brontë was a woman born too soon, constrained by her upbringing and whose only outlet for her passion and fierce intelligence was her pen. Throughout the Cinderella-creepiness of Jane Eyre (1847), the subversive isolation of Villette (1853) or the feminist polemic that is Shirley (1849), the frustrated howling of the author rings in our ears. “Don’t be fooled by the parsonages and the prim bonnets this bitch’s novels throb with sex. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) by author Sharon Bolton
FAMOUS BOOKS BY FEMALE AUTHORS PROFESSIONAL
Meet the woman who helped create fiction: Behn is considered England’s first-ever professional female writer thanks to her plays (featuring the then-mistress of the king, Nell Gwynne) and the novel Oroonoko (1688) – an astonishing book that is unflinching in its portrayal of slavery, violence and honour. Greatest female authors ever: the pioneers 107.