I was raised to believe that I could do everything a man could do, just as Ginger Rodgers did, “backwards and in high heels.” My discovery that social expectations and boundaries for women were vastly different than those for men came as an enormous shock, and struck me as deeply, tragically unfair. I take strength from women in history, as well as from fictional female characters, who passionately pursue roles in a man’s world that are considered transgressive or forbidden. As a glass-ceiling-shattering female film and television director I take inspiration from women who have the gritty determination to live on their own terms. And then tell it as they lived it.
Virginia Woolf knew – she insisted – that a life spent maintaining a house, throwing dinner parties, and taking children on sailing expeditions was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life.
Even a modest, domestic life is still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to the outside observer. Woolf refused to dismiss lives that most male writers ignore or even denigrate.
And you can get lost in her magnificent sentences; no one puts words together as beautifully as Virginia Woolf.
“Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”—Eudora Welty, from the Introduction.The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of…
The Black Angels contains all the things I crave in a book: heroic women who’ve been erased from history; women who took on the prejudices of society and refused to be kept down; glorious writing that weaves a riveting story with characters I came not only to admire, but also to love.
Black Angels tells the true story of 300 black nurses who changed the course of history, beginning in 1929 when white nurses staged a walk out at Staten Island's 2000-bed TB sanatorium, threatening New York with a public health catastrophe. City health officials made a radical decision to sanction a national call for 'colored nurses'. Lured by the promise of good pay, education, housing and most of all, a rare opportunity to work in a hospital free of quotas and segregated wards, 'Black Angels' from all over the country boarded trains and buses to enter wards that held both hope…
This novel’s power remains intact every time I read it, even as the nature of the tragedy seems to shift – from the perils of living by one’s looks (my teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world towards women (my young adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (my more recent readings).
Edith Wharton’s novel is a masterpiece, both electrifying and relevant, and worth re-reading as often as possible.
Once you finish the book, watch the Terence Davies-directed film, starring the luminous Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.
A bestseller when it was published nearly a century ago, this literary classic established Edith Wharton as one of the most important American writers in the twentieth century-now with a new introduction from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan.
Wharton's first literary success-a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy at the turn of the century-is considered by many to be her most important novel, and Lily Bart, her most unforgettable character. Impoverished but well-born, the beautiful and beguiling Lily realizes a secure future depends on her acquiring a wealthy husband. But with her romantic indiscretion, gambling debts, and a maelstrom…
I read The Golden Notebook when I was in my early twenties, facing the elation and terror of life as an adult. I remember vividly the state of excitement and awe in which I read it. Here was a writer who thought the unthinkable about the experience of being a woman in a man’s world, and fearlessly wrote it down in all its raw beauty.
To this day, if a friend of mine is in trouble, The Golden Notebook is the gift I give them, saying, “This book changed my life. “
One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, The Golden Notebook was brought to the attention of a wider public by the Nobel Prize award to Doris Lessing in 2007.
Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day-to-day emotions and dreams in a blue book. Anna’s…
This list wouldn’t be complete without a first-person memoir, a woman’s lived experience in a woman’s voice. And what better memoir to choose than Winterson's searingly honest account of how she reclaimed her childhood through the power of language.
In writing that is naked and brave, Winterson reveals a childhood that was ghastly, even Dickensian, but that was the crucible for Winterson’s incendiary talent.
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness,…
In 1945, Dr. Hannah Weiss, an Austrian-Jewish physicist, is removed from her essential work with the Critical Assemblies Team at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and is taken for interrogation. Major Jack Delaney, a rising star in the shadowy world of military intelligence, is convinced that someone in the Top Secret Manhattan Project is a spy; the mysterious female scientist soon becomes his primary suspect.
As Jack ruthlessly questions Hannah about her involvement with the infamous Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and her apparently friendly relationships with high-ranking members of the Nazi party, he slowly becomes seduced by her. Is Hannah a spy, or is she protecting a secret? When the truth about her life in Berlin is exposed, Hannah must choose between two lovers, and two versions of history.
Every picture tells a story, but it’s not always the one we expect or remember. Christmas Actually is a festive drama about family and forgiveness and a snapshot of modern family life, addressing Instagram to motherhood and everything in between.
Why Christmas? My publisher wanted my new novel to have a festive theme, specifically set in Australia–sun, surf, sunburn, and prawns. Christmas in Australia is very different from Christmas in the UK, USA, and Canada. We typically wear shorts and t-shirts, eat salad and seafood for Christmas lunch, and play beach cricket in the afternoon. Despite the season, conflicts, secrets,…
Time spent with family can be challenging, especially at Christmas actually…
Kate Cavendish is stuck in a rut. That is until a former colleague contacts her and offers her a chance to fulfil her lifelong dream of becoming a successful photographer.
With her focus pulled in all directions by her children, her pregnant sister, her newly-dating mother, and the niggling worry that her husband might be having an affair, Kate is filled with self-doubt.
Then as the countdown to Christmas begins, and memories of her own childhood resurface, Kate’s anxiety deepens – both personally and professionally. Can she move on…
