Best books… Arabella Weir
The author and comedian chooses her five favourite books. She is performing her new show Does My Mum Loom Big in This? at London’s Southbank on Saturday 12 February (southbankcentre.co.uk)
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, 2021 (Saraband £14.99). Set in 1965, this novel features a repressed woman entering therapy with an invented contemporary of R.D. Laing’s, in an effort to find out why her sister killed herself. It’s nothing like as bleak as it sounds – it’s laugh-out-loud funny.
Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1871 (Wordsworth Classics £2.99). I devoured this as a teenager, not fully realising that its main appeal was that it’s a feminist novel. It spoke to me as profoundly as it did, I think, because as a young woman and aspiring actor
I was being told I had to be and look a certain way, and I rebelled against it. Dorothea is my first feminist heroine.
A Short Gentleman by Jon Canter, 2008 (Vintage £12.99). There is little more enjoyable than the failure of those who have crowed loudly about their achievements, and this book revels in that. It’s about a man who maps out his life as a child, realises his plans and then it all goes wrong. Meticulously detailed and absolutely hilarious.
Good Behaviour by Molly Keane, 1981 (Virago £9.99). Another favourite from my teens. I identified so much with the main character, Aroon, a girl who doesn’t quite “fit in”. There’s a wonderful line describing her walking into a party in a strapless ballgown and feeling as if her bare shoulders fill the room. The way she felt about her body and not being “good enough” resonated deeply with me at the time.
The Diary of a Provincial
Lady by E.M. Delafield, 1930 (Penguin Classics £8.99). I read this long before Bridget Jones stormed the world, but now think it’s a sort of precursor to the latter with a hint of Hyacinth Bucket. It’s a sidesplittingly funny first-hand account of a middle-class woman in the late 1920s trying to manage domestic life while being constantly interrupted by a posher neighbour.