Writers Recommend: Victoria Smith

The author of HAGS talks us through some of her favourite feminist reads

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So you want to get into feminist literature but you don’t know where to start? Step forward Victoria Smith.

Victoria is a journalist and critic and author of the brilliant, HAGS - The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women.

Exclusively for White Ink and The Book Room, Victoria has shared with us the four favourite works of feminist fiction or non-fiction that have inspired her own writing, or those which she longs to press into other people’s hands. Her list is fascinating and I have already read a few myself.

Here they are…

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT by Jeannette Winterson

Victoria says: “I first read this book in my late teens, then again when I was in my twenties (using it as teaching material in a German secondary school), then more recently. I think right now – particularly as politics becomes extremely polarised – it would be easy to characterise it as ‘brave heroine suffers but eventually moves beyond her sad, bigoted community’ (which is, to a degree, how I saw it in my teens, very much identifying with the narrator, Jess). There’s some real fury in it, but it’s actually much more conciliatory than that, something achieved by the very unique blend of humour and pathos. Jess’s mother is at once cold and grotesque, yet there’s empathy for her, even at the end. It’s an incredible achievement for a book to be so brave and powerful in its politics, yet so tender.”

You can buy ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT here.

WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

Victoria says: “I studied this for A Level English, alongside Jane Eyre. I am most definitely Team Madwoman in the Attic. The word ‘gaslighting’ is perhaps overused, but this is a wonderful study in its progression, as the reader gradually witnesses the net closing in around Antoinette. You already know what happens to her – even those who haven’t read Charlotte Bronte know of Bertha Mason’s reputation – and by the end of Rhys’ version, perhaps Bertha/Antoinette is ‘mad’. But what else could she have said or done? I’ve read it several times, each time trying to find the ‘out’, reminded of situations and conversations where I, too, have foreseen the ‘crazy woman’ trap opening before me and not been able to sidestep it. The subtlety of the writing – this is what happened, this is who I am – is far more powerful, I think, than any direct defence of the madwoman as sane.” 

You can buy WIDE SARGASSO SEA here.

OF WOMAN BORN: MOTHERHOOD AS EXPERIENCE AND INSTITUTION by Adrienne Rich

Victoria says: “This was first published in 1976, but I didn’t read it until 2015, when I was 40 and pregnant with my third child. I grew up with various vague assumptions about second-wave feminism and motherhood (either they ignored it, or they were biological essentialists who wanted to keep women trapped in a nurturing role). My own understanding of feminism was as of something that would permit me to avoid the fate of my mother’s generation. What I hadn’t realised – and didn’t until I read Rich – was that this is what many women of that generation had believed, too. It was profoundly eye-opening to me to see the way in which blaming the women who went before you for their apparent acquiescence in norms which you wish to avoid yourself is part of what keeps these norms in place.” 

You can buy OF WOMAN BORN here.

IN HER NATURE: HOW WOMEN BREAK BOUNDARIES IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS by Rachel Hewitt

Victoria says: “This is a remarkable mix of memoir and history, charting the experiences of nineteenth-century female runners and walkers, and the way in which women’s access to open space has been controlled by men. Hewitt compares the advances and regressions to the experiences of women today, when street harassment and sexual violence not only limit our freedom of movement, but influence how we experience our own bodies. Quietly furious, and deeply moving, it shows how progress for women is not linear, and that our claims on the right to move – and to write and speak – are still viewed by some as conditional, to be withdrawn the moment we are deemed to be going too far.”

You can buy IN HER NATURE here.

Thank you so much to Victoria for recommending these brilliant reads. What did you think of her list? Have you read many of them? Let me know in the comments