Fans pick 100 books like The Manningtree Witches

This novel, by Meg Wolitzer, offers such a twist at the end, I’m not sure how to write about it as an example of a woman writer finding her voice without giving too much away.
The Wife is the story of a Noble Prize-winning author, Joe Castelman, and his wife, Joan, who have kept a terrible secret for all the years of their marriage. Because you know the topic of my selections here, you can surmise that Joan is also a writer, though she hides that fact. Her character tells the story, and we only slowly see the facets of their strange and deceptive marriage. It becomes clear that Joan is a very good writer indeed, and she’s tired of keeping her secret.

This clever tale will make you think about what it means to invent a life both on and off the page. And that there’s no stopping a… show more.

For me, this book had it all: a behind-the-scenes look at the incredible investigative journalism by NY Times journalists Jodi Cantor and Meghan Twohey, who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual assaults.

And the courageous journey of the survivors who chose to tell their stories—which ultimately ignited the #MeToo movement.

Unrecognised female labor is also the subject of this captivating non-fiction book by Hochschild, a sociologist drawing upon decades of research with fifty heterosexual couples in the Bay area. Hochschild is well-known for identifying ‘the second shift’ of childcare and domestic chores that working women often perform at home, on top of their professional commitment. This results in a rampant inequality of leisure time, and compounded with unequal pay in the workplace, exacerbates gender injustice in contemporary American society. But Hochschild also provides powerful examples of couples who counter-act this norm, while showing how individual attitudes towards gender and domestic responsibilities are influenced by class, ethnicity, and upbringing. Fascinating and illuminating. 

I loved this atmospheric debut, often described as a collection of interlinked short stories. Set on an isolated group of islands off the coast of Virginia, the stories span more than two centuries of the same family’s history: from the 19th century and far ahead into a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic future. There are intimations that a supernatural ‘second sight’ runs in the family and the book’s Southern Gothic vibe is nothing short of intriguing. But for all the hints of magic realism, the focus on female characters contending with obstacles of class and gender at different points in history is rooted in an understandable reality. Beautifully written descriptions of the natural environment, poignant characters, and local color all demonstrate Taylor’s imagination to be visionary and impressive. 

Jill is a little-known but fascinating novel from 1884 about a young woman who, bored of her upper-class life, runs away from home to become a maid.

Jill is everything Victorian women weren’t meant to be: ambitious, scheming, brave, happy to lie, and much more interested in money than marriage. She’s also a bit in love with the woman she works for, which Victorian women certainly weren’t meant to be either.

There is so much I love about Jill, but one of my favourite things about it is how it turns Victorian tropes and expectations on their head, taking the set-up of a typically male adventure narrative and giving it to the character of Jill. It’s a wonderfully proto-feminist Victorian classic and well worth a read.

This book is so expansive, Audre Lorde invented a whole new genre for it. She terms it “biomythography,” bringing together autobiography, mythology, fiction, poetry, and other forms of writing to tell her story of queer life.

I fell in love with Zami in college back in the day and have been re-reading it ever since. From her childhood in 1930s and 40s Harlem to her coming out as the self-proclaimed fat black lesbian “warrior poet,” who would come to shape black feminism in the late 20th century and beyond, Zami charts the life, loves, and transformative ideas of one of our most important writers.

Zami is both muse and guide, showing us how the iconic feminist writer came to be, and how pleasure, power, creative expression, and community are indispensable to our own freedom today.  

A National Book Award finalist, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick is a brilliantly written compendium of essays that should be read by everyone. This awe-inspiring collection tackles beauty standards, media, capitalism, and white supremacy all with a fierce wit and through a Black feminist lens. You will count yourself lucky to read these essays by one of the most important thinkers of our time. Cottom is wildly sharp and funny. She is an academic and profound but this book is accessible and readable. If you are like me you will want to read this twice.  

I love this book not just because of its enduring importance - Woolf remains a towering feminist figure - but because of its vivid, imaginative writing.

Based on lectures given to female students at Cambridge, Woolf’s essay argues powerfully for the intellectual independence of women. Such independence, she reasons, must first be materially possible, hence the female writer’s need for that famous "room of one’s own."

To exemplify this, Woolf imagines a certain Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s equally talented sister: would she not be incapable of achieving the same success as her brother owing to the patriarchal structures of society? In our post-Me Too world a century later, the question remains vital.

This book is a typical first-person account of a student in a program (medical, in this case) who encounters some discrepancies between the idealistically-drawn portrait of how a medical school is supposed to operate and the actual realities in which jealousies, territoriality, and the ongoing scramble to acquire and defend power within the institution play a major role. The main character is naïve to such considerations until they are made apparent to him. 

This recently published excavation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is almost as thick as Beauvoir’s massive tract, but don’t let that put you off. The photo of Beauvoir on the cover conveys an insouciant “Yeah, sure” attitude, and Meryl Atman uncannily channels that sentiment into a dazzlingly authoritative and entertaining discussion of why the overwhelming majority of the criticism of Beauvoir’s famous tome happens to be misguided and wrong. The book is about gender, race, sexuality, class, and privilege, but it isn’t a polemic. It is an exercise in critical reading at its most invigorating.