International Women's Day
It’s International Women’s Day and to celebrate we’ve asked Readings staff to tell us about their favourite women writers.
Jess Au, Readings Monthly editor
, for example, becoming for a time obsessed with the word ‘quasi’ as an incorrect replacement for ‘sort of’: ‘“I am quasi ready to go,” I would announce. Or, “I’m feeling a bit quasi today.”’
A Gate at the Stairs is a great read, as are a good majority of her short stories, but my favourite Moore by far is Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? This is a slim, coming-of-age novella about two girls, Berie Carr and Silsby Chaussee, bored and adolescent in the small town of Horsehearts. Berie works the ticket booth at the local Storyland amusement park while her best-friend Sils pantomimes the Cinderella. They’re as different and as rebellious and as deeply attached to each other as young suburbia allows them to be – smoking, dressing up, sneaking out, stealing and dreaming. And that, really, is all you need to know.
Chris Gordon, Events Manager
. This tale tells of an unruly teenage feminist growing to womanhood in rural New South Wales.
This heroine, Sybylla, is one of the most appealing characters in Australian literature and obviously had much in common with Franklin herself, who wrote the novel while she was still a teenager. It was published in 1901 with the support of Australian writer, Henry Lawson. (Remember IWD was not even made an official day to acknowledge until 1910.) As Franklin had feared, gender influenced the critical reception of her novel. When her identity as a woman writer was made public, judgements about its literary merit were common.
Nina Kenwood, Online Manager
I was a teenager when I first read Looking for Alibrandi. Along with Ellie from Tomorrow When The War Began and Elspeth from Obernewtyn, Josie Alibrandi quickly became a character who really meant something to me – she helped me get through the murk of my teenage years. The novel is fresh, funny, real and heartbreaking and has remained that way in the four or five times I’ve read it since. After Alibrandi, I remember crying my eyes out reading Marchetta’s second novel Saving Francesca (and, more recently, feeling utter delight at revisiting the characters again in The Piper’s Son).
Back when it was first released, I approached On the Jellicoe Road with hesitation because the first two chapters didn’t easily invite me into the story and I was worried I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I had the rest of Marchetta’s work. Then I kept reading and discovered I loved it more than I could have hoped. On the Jellicoe Road is an extraordinary novel that reveals itself slowly and perfectly to the reader and introduces four characters – Taylor, Jonah, Chaz and Raffy – that are some of the very best you’ll ever see in YA.
Jason Austin, Buyer
I was lucky enough to meet her a couple of years ago when she popped into the Carlton store one afternoon, and after realising who she was I awkwardly gushed how much I loved her novels. How The Light Gets In, Carry Me Down and her last novel This Is How are truly outstanding pieces of fiction. She writes in a dialogue-heavy style but the language she uses is spare; the emotion is in that dialogue, but she encourages the reader to work with what the characters are saying to find the right tone. It’s a style of writing that I find fascinating and involving as it causes tension.
She’s also just a darn good storyteller.
Kara Nicholson, Bookseller
is still one of the quintessential dissertations on women and fiction writing. Commenting on the effect of centuries of fiction writing dominated by men she writes that it ‘was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex…Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity’.
Woolf herself was of course a prolific and brilliant fiction writer and my favourite of her novels is Mrs Dalloway, a captivating modernist journey through one day in the life of a London socialite. It’s one of the only novels I’ve read where upon finishing the last page I turned back to the beginning to start reading the book again.
Bronte Coates, Online & Readings Monthly Assistant
features comics about the invention of basketball,
The Great Gatsby
, hipsters ruining everything and more, and receives over a million hits each month, while her book of
was included in the
Time’s
top ten fiction list for 2011.
While there are a lot of female writers I love and admire, I think Beaton is the most appropriate to talk about on International Women’s Day because not only do I find it secretly empowering for a female to be earning such wide-spread love and respect in the comics industry but also, she is just so unbelievably great when it comes to ‘girl talk’.
Her smart, funny comics frequently apply feminist interpretations to figures from history and literature, and in the process, manage to upturn all my personal worries about being a female on their heads. Put simply, she makes me feel good about being a girl without feeling patronised or intimidated.
And now, here’s a comic about strong female characters.
If you’re looking for more recommendations on great writing from women, then check out the
