Best Women's Historical Fiction

Melissa Harrison, 2019

Is this historical fiction or is it sublime nature writing? Answer: it's both. Melissa Harrison completely immersed me into the rural Sussex world of Edie in 1933, a world unchanged for centuries. It is described in achingly beautiful, hypnotic, poetic language: the kind of prose I'd hoped I would write when I turned from poetry to fiction but which has so far escaped me. I was utterly captivated by the multi-textured world she creates, the shock of the ending, and the darkness which lies beneath. I loved the way she trusted the reader to understand what was going on without spelling it out. Superbly controlled and crafted. I can only stand back and applaud.

Claire Keegan, 2021

This is a magical book, which somehow manages to be Christmassy and full of love and hope while at the same time exposing the horrifying truth at its heart. It is set in an unnamed town in Ireland in 1985, which makes the central horror of the Magdalen laundry all the more ghastly, though it has such a timeless quality that you wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was set in 1955 or 1935. At just over a hundred pages, set in biggish print, this is more like a short story or novella than a novel, but the light deftness of the writing somehow makes it something much bigger.

Louisa Treger, 2022

A haunting and memorable classic of biographical fiction. The real-life Nellie Bly arrives in New York, keen to make her name as a journalist and willing to do almost anything. Daringly, astonishingly, she agrees to pretend to be mad and is incarcerated in a terrifying and notorious insane asylum. The horrors of the place are almost unspeakable as she descends into the darkest depths. The fact that this is a true story and that her report helped to change the system for the better makes it all the more powerful.

Louise Fein, 2021

Sometimes I look around and think the world has not improved much, but then a book like this reminds me of how far we have come. This is a heartbreaking tale about a child with epilepsy in a time when the fashion for eugenics meant that children with epilepsy were wrenched away from their families, shut up in institutions, injected with ghastly substances, which turned them into zombies, and forcibly sterilised so they could not pass on this 'defect'. As a mum and a grandmother, I was twisted and torn apart as the mother in this novel (who has few rights, being a woman) tries to rescue her beloved child.

Gill Paul, 2022

Gill Paul is a master of biographical fiction, always finding fascinating women from the past to write about. The Manhattan Girls, about Dorothy Parker and her circle in the glittering 1920s, is completely riveting. Dorothy Parker may have been the wittiest person who ever lived, but she was deeply troubled and only survived, thanks to her loyal friends. This has been compared to a 1920s version of Sex and the City. Humour, joy, sorry, friendship - oh yes, and sex, and an un-housetrained dog!

Jane Rogers, 1999

I remember Jane Rogers talking about the book when it was first published and made into a TV series in the 1990s. She said she wrote about the past because it was a way of shining a forensic light onto the issues that surround us today. In this case, the subject was religion - hard to write about in the modern world without treading on toes or being accused of cultural appropriation. But the past belongs to us all. In this way, I can write in The Prisoner's Wife about what happens when Fascism is allowed to flourish and in Acts of Love and War about the refugee crisis caused by war. What I particularly admired about Mr Wroe's Virgins was how each section was told from a different character's point of view, examining the complexity of history itself as well as telling a rollicking good story.