The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction has launched a project to highlight the books written by women which have impacted our lives.
You can nominate your choice using the #ThisBook hashtag on Twitter. The top 20 will be revealed in July.
A number of high-profile women have revealed their favourites and there have been some eclectic choices so far. Tanni Grey Thompson has chosen ‘Gone Girl‘ by Gillian Flynn and Mary Beard has selected ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Brontë. Caitlin Moran has chosen ‘Two Pence to Cross the Mersey’ by Helen Forrester while Grace Dent picked ‘The Pursuit of Love’ by Nancy Mitford. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ has been chosen by Shami Chakrabati and Sharleen Spiteri and I suspect it will feature somewhere near the top of the list when it is announced in a few weeks time.
I chose ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt which I read at the end of my first year of university after a longish period of not really reading anything purely for pleasure. In a roundabout kind of way, it led to the creation of this blog.
Which book written by a woman has had the most impact on you?
A Little Blog of Books 
I suppose it would have to be Wuthering Heights. Loved it as a teenager, and re-read it every couple of years (although I haven’t for a while now). Works on so many levels for me.
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I chose Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf – I never looked at things in quite the same way after that…..
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Reblogged this on M.T. Miles.
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I’m wondering if you could introduce this post differently. It took until the end to ascertain what exactly we were supposed to be nominating!
This has illustrated how few female writers I’ve read! Not sure why this is; I’ve certainly no prejudices either way! I think my favourite book written by a woman is The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner. Incidentally, I’ve heard great things about Donna Tart’s writing. Will have to check out The Secret History…
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Agreed and amended slightly – it was a long day yesterday!
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All good, mate. Hope I didn’t sound in any way aggressive. Thoroughly enjoy what you do here 🙂
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Gosh, that’s tough. Probably Small Island by Andrea Levy.
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I’d choose Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child. It was not only a wonderful book but really did change my perception of myself as a reader!
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Th Bluest Eye! That book spoke to me about identity and loving myself the way I am. That book must speak to a lot of black women.
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The Secret History is such a great choice. I’m going to have to give this some thought.
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I just read The Secret History and loved it. It’s amazing and creepy and gets inside your head. I think it would have to be White Teeth by Zadie Smith for me. It’s a book that is just bursting with life and makes me happy whenever I read even a few pages.
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I think I’d choose Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, but there are so many great books to choose from…Thanks for introducing me to this project – I hadn’t heard about it before.
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Almost impossible – but I think it would have to be Anne of Green Gables, since I feel it was the book (series) that made me love reading beyond all else and taught me that it could take you to a different world, and that fictional characters could be as real as living ones. If I hadn’t read those books at a young age, would I have gone on to read all the others? Maybe…but maybe not, or maybe not so soon.
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I had to think about this for a couple of days. I finally decided to go with Enid Blyton’s complete series of her St. Clare’s stories. The hardcover edition I got when I was 11 was over 2,800 pages long. Ever since then, there is no chunkster that could ever intimidate me… which has made a big difference in the books I’ve read over the years.
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It would be hard to choose just one, but one of my top picks would be, in the adult category, Reading Lolita In Teheran by Azir Nafisi, which taught me to read more skillfully. In the child category, Harriet The Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, which gave me permission to be myself.
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The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault and Brat Farrer by Josephine Tey feature about top of my long list. Embarrassingly, I don’t really know how to use the hashtag on Twitter.
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