The best books about female characters who rise from the ashes

I can’t remember the first time that I read Persuasion, but I re-read it every year for the depth and empathy with which Austen brings Anne to life, as well as she draws other characters.

At the beginning of the novel Anne Elliot is presented as a young woman who has lost nearly everything – her mother at a tender age, the love of her life, and is about to lose her home. She has a cold and unsympathetic father and sisters and very little else.

The deed is done and she has to move from her home, but it is when she comes to Bath, and has to confront the man she loved and lost that she actually, truly, begins to live again.

It is a book for all those who have loved and lost and who find the strength to pick themselves up, believe in their own judgment, rather than those of others, and live and love again more fully. 

This book is responsible for me missing my tube stop on my way to work so as you can imagine I found it a riveting read.

Michelle Styles is a well-known romance writer who has written a number of Viking-era romances. I enjoyed this one in particular, because I loved the main character, Dagmar Kolbeindottar. She is a warrior, not a lover, or so she thinks – until she is captured by the Celtic warlord, Aedan Mac Connal, who has been commanded by her father, under duress himself, to bring her back.

Her father then forces her to make a choice and marry – and she choses Aedan, hoping he will refuse her. Cue misunderstandings, passionate trysts, and an ending that is truly satisfying, as well as brilliant atmosphere and creation of characters including doughty Dagmar.

Anyone who has spent any time in the world of journalism can recognise the flawed but ultimately lovable character of Thorn Marsh, Marika Cobold’s main character, who like far too many reporters, myself included, is far too often concentrated on her work rather than on living in the real world of human relationships.

Journalistic ethics should define us and our work, but Thorn falls from grace (or rather crosses a line). When her paper is taken over, she is placed on a mid-week supplement and is pushed for heart-warming clickbait. She actually makes up a story about an angel appearing on the Heath, crossing many a journalistic line in doing so.

Cue a tale about love, honour, loyalty, and how to pick yourself up when you’ve done wrong – and had wrong done to you. I loved Thorn. Hopefully she will reappear in another novel by Marika Cobbold one day soon. 

There is a shelf in the hallway full of battered books by women I read when I was a student and shortly afterwards – the books that I read and gave me those shivers of recognition – of feeling that this writer is speaking directly to me.

At some point some other young feminist must have told me, read this. And I did, and I can still remember certain passages that I read and re-read and sometimes copied out in my spidery handwriting to act as my mantras, then and now.

It’s a call to arms, it’s a passionate beating of the female breast, it’s the making of the heroine that we all need as women – Britain’s first feminist who spoke for quirky females everywhere when she wrote in a letter to her sister Everina, “I am not born to tread in the beaten track.”

But this is digression, for there’s nothing more thrilling than Wollstonecraft writing in Vindication that she wishes women not to have power of men, “but over themselves.” A heroine who picked herself and others up so many times – and wrote the books to encourage every generation since.

I read this years ago and then devoured all of Nawal el Sadawi’s books, fiction and non-fiction.

I have Iranian heritage on my birth father’s side and have always been fascinated in the life I could have lived as an Iranian girl, if I had been raised there instead of the UK.

So reading Nawal ed Sadawi’s books, set in Egypt where she was born, educated, and worked as a doctor and writer, gave me an insight I really wanted into Islamic societies and how women can live in them.

Woman at Point Zero is harrowing, brilliant, immersive, and painful, taking as its theme the story of Firdaus, who tells the story of why she has killed a man before she is executed. She explains why and her courage and eloquence have stayed with me ever since.

We need these stories of women on the edge who still, somehow, resist and refuse to conform, even if they pay the greatest of prices for their bravery.