THE WOMAN’S READING LIST

We made a reading list for men, so naturally, we had to make one for women. Not because women require different books, but because leaving us out seemed both rude and rather unimaginative.

There are books women are forever being told they should read. Books about becoming more confident, more successful, more organised, more desirable, less anxious, better with money and, presumably, capable of preparing a nutritionally balanced supper while maintaining excellent boundaries.

These are not those books.

1. REBECCA

Daphne du Maurier

A young woman marries a wealthy widower and arrives at his enormous Cornish house to discover that his dead wife appears to have considerably more presence than she does.

Du Maurier gives us jealousy, class, obsession, sex, insecurity and one of literature's great houses in Manderley. But what makes Rebecca so clever is how thoroughly it understands comparison. Our narrator becomes consumed by a woman she has never met, constructing an impossibly glamorous rival from fragments supplied by everyone around her.

Instagram before Instagram.

2. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

Edith Wharton

Beautiful people in beautiful rooms making themselves absolutely miserable because somebody might talk.

Newland Archer is engaged to the perfectly respectable May Welland when the decidedly less respectable Countess Ellen Olenska arrives in New York society. What follows is a love story conducted beneath an enormous weight of manners, expectation and things nobody is allowed to say aloud.

Wharton understood society because she came from it. Her great trick was recognising how vicious good manners could be.

3. THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY

Patricia Highsmith

Tom Ripley wants money, beauty, Italy and somebody else's life. Reasonable enough. His methods are where things become problematic.

Highsmith created one of literature's most unsettling characters because Ripley isn't a monster in the conventional sense. He's charming. He likes nice clothes. He appreciates beautiful houses. He simply has a somewhat relaxed attitude towards murder.

Read it somewhere sunny.

4. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's argument is famously simple: if a woman is going to write, she requires money and a room of her own.

Nearly a century later, the details have changed but the central idea remains rather stubbornly relevant. Creative freedom requires actual freedom: time, space and enough independence to think without somebody asking where the clean towels are.

It is intelligent, funny and much less solemn than its reputation suggests.

5. I CAPTURE THE CASTLE

Dodie Smith

Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain lives with her spectacularly impractical family in a crumbling English castle, where there is very little money and an enormous amount of personality.

Then two wealthy American brothers arrive.

Smith gives us first love, poverty, creativity, eccentric parents and the strange period when childhood begins disappearing underneath you. Cassandra is one of those narrators you miss once the book is finished.

Also, any novel beginning with someone sitting in a kitchen sink deserves a place here.

6. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

Muriel Spark

Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher with enormous confidence in her own importance and very specific ideas about which of her pupils belong to the crème de la crème.

She is charismatic, romantic, controlling, ridiculous and occasionally magnificent.

Spark's novel is wonderfully sharp about influence: how easily admiration becomes obedience, how seductive certainty can be and what happens when somebody believes their own mythology a little too completely.

It is also very funny, which helps.

7. OUT OF AFRICA

Karen Blixen

Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to run a coffee farm and left seventeen years later having accumulated enough life for several novels.

There are landscapes, animals, friendships, disasters, love affairs and Denys Finch Hatton arriving periodically in his aeroplane, which is admittedly difficult for most modern men to compete with.

Read today, the book also requires an awareness of the colonial world Blixen inhabited and the unequal structures surrounding it. But as a memoir of place, memory and a vanished life, it remains extraordinary.

8. THE PURSUIT OF LOVE

Nancy Mitford

The Radlett family are rich, eccentric, badly behaved and considerably more entertaining than most people one encounters in real life.

At its centre is Linda, who approaches love with tremendous enthusiasm and not always tremendous judgement. She marries badly, falls in love repeatedly and careers through the political and social upheavals of interwar Europe.

Mitford understood that families can be both unbearable and the funniest thing that ever happened to you.

9. THE PRICE OF SALT

Patricia Highsmith

Before Carol was a film, it was The Price of Salt, a novel Highsmith published under a pseudonym in 1952.

Therese, a young shop assistant, meets the elegant Carol and becomes completely captivated. What follows is romantic, tense and surprisingly modern, particularly because Highsmith refused to give her characters the punishment that queer women were routinely handed in fiction of the period.

It is a love story with nerve.

10. THE HOUSE OF MIRTH

Edith Wharton

Lily Bart is beautiful, intelligent and perfectly equipped for the society she inhabits, except for one unfortunate flaw: she isn't quite willing to play the game properly.

She needs money. Marriage is the obvious solution. But every time security presents itself, something in Lily resists.

Wharton is merciless about a world in which a woman's beauty functions almost like currency until, suddenly, it doesn't. More than a century later, Lily's predicament feels uncomfortable in ways it probably shouldn't.

AND ONE MORE...

West with the Night, Beryl Markham

Because occasionally you need to stop reading about drawing rooms altogether.

Beryl Markham trained racehorses, flew aeroplanes across Africa and became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west without stopping.

Her memoir is full of danger, landscape, horses and the peculiar confidence of someone who sees an aeroplane, an ocean and terrible weather and apparently thinks: yes, that seems manageable.

Whether every story surrounding Markham is quite as straightforward as the legend is another matter. Frankly, that only makes her more interesting.

No morning routine. No manifestation journal. No instructions for becoming your best self.

Just a very large life.