Feminist fictions

Someone asked me recently for a suggested reading list of feminist fiction. I realised that I would class a lot of these as some of my favourites, and I love thinking and talking about them, and I would recommend all of these to anyone, so I thought this would be a great idea for a blog post. Obviously this list isn’t exhaustive, and I'm confident that there are more amazing feminist fiction works out there that I’ve not yet discovered, but this is a (big) handful of my favourites. Hope you enjoy!

The Power - Naomi Alderman

I couldn’t wait to read this as soon as I heard of it, and I was not disappointed. The societal gender power dynamic is flipped but made literal - women have the power to send lethal electricity from their bodies. It makes for an interesting look into the way in which “power” is created, used and passed along, and the implications of one sex being historically perceived as more powerful than the other.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

This one has had a lot of attention, particularly in the last couple of years, and this is wholly deserved. It’s set in a (not too distant) dystopian future where women are reduced to their differing functions and live as wholly dependent upon and belonging to men - something reflected in all levels of their life, as the protagonist’s previous life and identity is completely taken from her - she is renamed Offred, ‘of Fred’. It’s definitely a must-read and a landmark piece of dystopian feminist literature.

Good Bones - Margaret Atwood

This is a collection of short speculative pieces, explorations of classical myths, fairy tales, and re-imagined biographies of some female literary figures. Atwood gives voices to some female figures silenced and deemed “wicked” in their male-dominated literary worlds, such as the Ugly Stepsisters and Hamlet’s Gertrude. These are very easy to read, and are as fun as they are troubling.

Surfacing - Margaret Atwood

This is one of Margaret Atwood’s earlier novels and definitely differs from the more modern style, however it’s definitely possible to draw lines of similarity between her early and later works. This one takes an interesting look at isolation, female identity and mental health. I particularly love the ways in which the protagonist interacts with nature and the way in which Atwood plays with boundaries.

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter

I hold Angela Carter responsible for my love of feminist fiction. These short stories or “feminist fairy tales” were my first taste of Carter and I adore them.

The Passion of New Eve - Angela Carter

This one is pretty weird and potentially challenging to read but is a really interesting look at sex and gender identities. It's violent and whimsical in equal parts. I have a particular interest in “monstrous” femininity (would recommend The Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed if this sounds good to you) and this read was made even better looking through that lens, I think. The plot is a bizarre whirlwind, and the characters are so curious and transgressive in a quintessentially Angela Carter way. I loved it.

Hot Milk - Deborah Levy

This one kind of took me by surprise, and I found that I got a lot more out of it than I was expecting to (and than some others have). It’s a beautiful book - a perfect “summer read” with not a huge amount of plot - but what is there is great. On the opening page, Levy quotes Hélène Cixous The Laugh of the Medusa (which is a fundamental poststructuralist feminist essay about creating new structures for female and feminist communication). This idea is referenced throughout the text, and it’s something I really enjoyed picking up on. Levy uses her characters to explore different female personality tropes and female relationships, and she also questions senses of “identity” as a whole.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear Macbride

This one is a difficult read, in terms of both style and content - Macbride’s style is unique and does take quite a while to grow accustomed to, but is really effective once you get used to it. The content is upsetting and our troubled unnamed narrator is subject to a world of horrors, and the way in which Macbride navigates these is unlike anything I’ve read before. I actually used this as a primary text for my dissertation, so it’s safe to say that it comes highly recommended by me!

Gather the Daughters - Jennie Melamed

This is such a captivating read, and definitely one of my new favourite dystopian novels. It’s pretty difficult to stomach a lot of the content, but that discomfort is what makes it so gripping. This is centred upon a rural cult-like island community, in which the daughters, immediately upon reaching puberty, are forced into a “summer of fruition” and leave as wives and mothers-to-be. Only a select number of men are allowed to wander the “wastelands” of the civilisation they left behind, and thus the knowledge passed around the islanders is extremely limited, leaving them with questions of other possible civilisations and ways of life.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

This book is so haunting, it’s a powerful reminder of the horrors of slavery and its impact on the lives and legacy of those subjected. It’s a really interesting use of the supernatural and I found it far more impactful than I was expecting, and I found once I settled into the supernatural elements I was captivated. It’s a highly emotional read and will stay with you long after you put it down! It's become one of my all-time favourite books.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

This one probably isn’t a surprising addition to a “feminist fiction” list, but it’s an important one. The realistic and mundane elements of this add to how shocking and effective an exploration of mental health decline it is - made all the more poignant by it’s semi-autobiographical nature. I read this whilst at university and found it really moving, it’s a must-read.

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

This postcolonial novel acts as a response/prequel to Jane Eyre, and explores the life of Antoinette (Brontë’s “Bertha”) as she meets and marries Rochester. In Jane Eyre, Bertha is famed as “the madwoman in the attic” and is given zero human personality traits - this text aims to reverse that and imagines her as a fully dimensional character. As a Creole daughter of former slave-owners, Antoinette is seen as an outsider by every community she encounters, and through this position, Rhys explores ideas of race and belonging. Sadly the ending of this story is already set in history by Brontë, but this is definitely a necessary counterpart to Jane Eyre.

Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward

This story follows Esch, a young teenage girl in a poverty stricken family in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina - it’s a necessary reminder of those marginalised and those whose stories and suffering was obscured by the disaster. The book begins with a lurid description of Esch’s brother’s prized fighting dog, China, giving birth to puppies - a scene which sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Ward’s writing is so graphic and immediate, and makes this story so effective. Esch is obsessed with myth, particularly that of Medea and Jason, and Ward cleverly weaves Esch’s story alongside Medea’s.