The best books about and by madly inspiring women

I was so transfixed by Jung Chang’s saga of her family in the 1990s that when I finished it, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it all over again. We in the West seemed to know so little about China then, and here was this very human and readable account of a totally different world, itself going through a period of seismic changes—and how three generations of women coped with it all.  There’s a strong impression of the importance of family, and through these heart-rending personal sagas, we do also begin to get to know China. It’s a tale of survival, and despite many horrors, an uplifting one, thanks to the courage of these Daughters of China.

Award-winning novelist Molteno takes us on a mesmerising journey of discovery, tracing the origins of her fictional worlds. From the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, in small English towns or huge Indian literary festivals, she engages with people she meets and is inspired by them. Through these vignettes she threads reflections on the creative process—why we write, and what fiction does for us. Through Marion’s clear and involving writing, we encounter not one but several truly remarkable women, as she weaves the emergence of her writing life into her own much-travelled and absorbing story.

Helen Marquard’s search for a piano teacher led her to Hedwig Stein who had fled Berlin in 1933 with her Russian Jewish husband, both concert pianists, to start again from nothing. A large, vivid woman, Hedwig freely shared her ideas on music, art, philosophy, literature. Later, Marquard discovered Hedwig had written a diary, and determined to bring us this story that would otherwise have been lost, enabling Hedwig and her husband to take their rightful place in the roll-call of émigrés who have contributed so much to UK cultural life. Hedwig put her husband’s career and her children first, yet she never gave up on her own career, which continued its own quiet flourishing after her husband’s sudden death. 

Among a tiny handful of intrepid women travellers in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Freya Sterk stands out. Not only for her courage in going where no woman or man had gone before in remote and dangerous Middle Eastern regions and for her unique mastery of their languages, but also for her own beautiful writing. Largely self-educated, she is adopted by the Royal Geographical Society and lionised as an explorer. And she revels in the limelight. Knighted by the Queen at age 82, Freya emerges as appealingly human and fallible, and unusually democratic in her dealings with the people she meets in these remote regions.  Her biographer has created a brilliant, absorbing, and penetrating picture of this flamboyant woman.

Christabel Bielenberg’s autobiography I find madly inspiring for her courage and clear, perceptive writing. A well-connected Anglo-Irish Englishwoman, she marries a German lawyer in 1934 only to find herself living through the war and the horrors of Nazi rule in Germany. Staggeringly, near the war’s end, she manages to talk her husband Peter out of a concentration camp with the camp commandant after Peter was implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler. It’s that rare book that I would have loved to last much longer, especially for showing how ordinary Germans changed and got corrupted by Nazism—but others managed to retain their humanity. She shows us the triumph of the human spirit, even in the face of a downward slide into evil and corruption.