Best books… Rosalind Miles

The writer and broadcaster chooses her favourite books. a follow-up to her 1988 Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller

is out now, published by Virago at £25

The Women’s History of the World,

by George Eliot, 1859 (Penguin £8.99). World history resounds with women’s silenced voices, and Dinah speaks out for Eliot’s aunt, a lay preacher banned from her ministry for life. Gorgeous, too, are the lush Warwickshire settings and Shakespearean characters such as Mrs Poyser.

by Mary Webb, 1916 (Michael Walmer £6.99). A beguilingly old-fashioned story with a strikingly modern treatment of love and pain at its heart: a heroine Deborah, rooted in the Shropshire landscape, whose soul wanders with the stars but who still washes dishes and brings the cattle home.

by Jean Rhys, 1966 (Penguin £7.99). All her life Rhys listened to women’s silences and made them cry out. Her reinvention of the gargoyle Bertha in

as the broken blossom Antoinette is a triumph of revolutionary feminist re-creation.

Eyre

Jane

by Françoise Sagan, 1954 (Penguin £7.99). Still unrecognised as a minimasterpiece of existentialism, this riveting account of cool Parisians on a hot Riviera was a world away from the sweet, safe shires of my girlhood: the machinations of teenager Cécile were an eye-opener.

by Mary McCarthy, 1963 (Virago £9.99). An eye-opener and legopener, too, this exposé of the lives of women graduates did as much as The Beatles to put sex on the map. McCarthy’s depiction of Dottie’s tragicomic struggles with her Dutch cap demonstrates the value of women telling it like it is.

by Howard Jacobson, 1983 (Vintage £9.99). Sefton is on his knees and the only way is up. Every word of this novel rings true, and nothing is funnier than the truth. But as a master of creating laughter on the edge of pain, Jacobson also likes us to think.