A few must-reads, for everyday to be Women’s day

With International Book Day being on the 3^rd of March and International Women’s Day on the 8th, the perfect article idea seemed served on a platter: a list of must-reads written by women. I started getting down to the task, when I realized that, despite my better intentions, my reading lists were mostly populated by male authors. Shocking? Not really. But this made my task slightly more challenging. Once I investigated the matter though, I had to cut down my recommendations from about 30, to provide you with seven of my all-time favorite fiction and non-fiction works written by women.

1. Begin your readings with the amazing author and activist Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. I would sincerely recommend reading her every work, but a good one to begin with is her 2013 novel, Americanah. This novel masterfully explores the inextricably linked roles of gender, race, and national identity, in forming every individual’s identity. Through the tumultuous life of Ifemulu, young Nigerian woman emigrating to America for her studies, Adichie analyses the strong racism anchored in society both in Nigeria and in the United States, and the resulting discrimination, accentuated by the immigrant status held by the protagonist. If this paragraph has not been enough to entice you into reading this novel, I will add that the story also revolves around the complicated love story of Ifemelu and Obinze, her Nigerian teenage love.
2. In second place is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, which tells the story of the Shakespeare family in the Warwickshire of the 16^th century. The narrative focuses on Agnes, a remarkable woman both sought and feared by her community for her eccentricity. The reader follows her growing love and marriage to William Shakespeare, and her relation to maternity from childbirth to the unbearable grief of loss. O’Farrell explores the way in which any parent’s worst nightmare, the death of a child, can lead to wide artistic repercussions, as became the case for Shakespeare. The genius of O’Farrell stems from her interwoven narratives, mixing two timelines of the Shakespeare’s family life, along with the progression of the pestilence plague in the England of the 1590s,
3. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. You might have come across the famous series adapted from this book, but have you read Atwood’s brilliant and chilling dystopia? For the newcomers, The Handmaid’s Tale presents the story of a dystopian theocratic regime which arose following dangerously low reproduction rates in the United States. In this new regime, women’s sole purpose is to conceive, and to fulfill that purpose, ‘Handmaids’ are assigned to wealthy couples who cannot have a child of their own. We follow the destiny of Offred, Handmaid for a cruel man named The Commander, and her life in a world where her every movement is restricted and where The Eye, Gilead’s secret police force, watches everything and everyone.
4. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates is the romanticized biography of Marylin Monroe. If you had told me a few years ago I would read 900 pages of a fictionalized account of the life of one of America’s most idealized figures, I would probably have laughed. However, Oates’ writing got me through these hundreds of pages in the short span of a few weeks. This page-turner recounts the glamorous life of Monroe, but also the darker side of a woman whose quest of an unattainable and inordinate love led to frequent abuse by life. Oates pulls us into a squalid world, where women’s bodies are a commodity which they are obliged to exchange to secure profit and status. She leads us through the transformations of Monroe, from the young orphanage girl Norma Jeane Baker, to Marylin Monroe, artificially created sex symbol, to finally reach Blonde, the symbolic personae with the perfect life Monroe wished to attain – the ‘pure and virginal creature of fairy tales’ though she is still despised in pornography and fantasy. The evolution of Hollywood, the Communists witch hunt, and foremost, the complicated status of women… no topic is missing from this brilliant novel.
5. Rebecca by Daphné du Maurier: Get ready to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the beautiful estate of Manderley. In the beautiful mansion, a woman who recently married a widower is haunted by the presence of the ex-wife of the latter, Rebecca. The presence appears to be imprinted across the house and becomes omnipresent in the life of the new mistress of the domain. Be ready for a plot twist which will prevent you from putting this novel down before its end. Du Maurier masters a climate charged with mystery and fear weighing on the protagonist, which will keep you on your toes throughout the novel.
6. The Montana Stories, Katherine Mansfield: In this collection of short stories, Mansfield’s writing is properly captivating in its subtlety, as she writes about the society of her time. Standing in strong rupture with the writing style of the beginning of the 20^th century, her style has been qualified as allowing a ‘stream of consciousness’, in the sense that the reader is given access to all the emotions felt by the characters, and lives, through them, reaching the exact state Mansfield aimed for them to experience.
7. bell hooks, Feminism Is For Everybody. For this last title, I picked a non-fiction work by bell hooks, a great feminist activist, professor, and author. In her 2000 essay Feminism Is For Everybody, hooks addresses the estrangement of new generation activists from the appellation of ‘feminist’, though they pursue goals similar to those of the movement. She reckons that this phenomenon originates in the narrowness of the mainstream feminist movement, both in the mid-20^th century and today, which in turn leads to the exclusion of most. This captivating essay will remind you the many goals feminism still has to fight for, as well as the way to unite and achieve these aims.