Gill Hornby

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. PICKING out three books about women’s oppression is so easy it’s impossible. Unless they were written the day before yesterday, all books are shaped by this, deep down.

Those classics by women, from Jane Austen onwards, with their contemporary heroines, were set against the backdrop of a patriarchal society. And the rest were written by — God bless ’em — men.

So let’s focus on those written the day before yesterday, figuratively speaking, and see what they tell us. In Emma Donoghue’s Room, a woman and her son are, for years, held captive by a man in a shed behind his house. (It’s cheerier than it sounds.) She is a horribly abused prisoner, but to her boy she is a hero. When she finally effects their escape, these two damaged creatures fumble towards independence together.

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life Of Bees bangs the drum for the female society. Of course, bees are the ultimate feminists: the females run the whole show. The story takes place in South Carolina in the Sixties, where there are inequalities everywhere.

Young Lily lives with her violent father and devoted black maid. The day a swarm flies into her bedroom is the day Lily and Rosaleen go on the run together. They end up living with a family of bee-keeping sisters, and in that sanctuary Lily finds the truth about her family, as well as the path to her own future.

Lastly, it would be impossible not to mention Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (it’s been all over the telly lately), this is a dystopian novel set in a future in which the fundamentalists are in charge.

The new republic of Gilead is run along Old Testament lines: men have control, women are handmaidens valued only for their fertility and forbidden to do pretty much everything.

It is a lesson on how things can go wrong, and how we should cherish and protect our rights together.