These are my very favourite books, in no particular order, and – as always – subject to change.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

I first read an abridged version when I was at primary school, and then read the full thing when I was a bit older. This, plus her sister’s Wuthering Heights (another essential read), which I read at school when I was 15, led to the beginning of my interest in Victorian novels.

I also love it for its proto-feminist overtones: ‘I am no bird; and not net ensnares me.’ Yes, reader, she does marry him, but only on her own terms. Then we have Bertha Mason, one of the most intriguing characters in English literature, if you ask me.

The archetypal comfort read. Which is why I have so many copies of it in my home.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

I’ve talked at length about this book all over the internet and I feel like I would only be repeating myself if I said it all again here. In short, I didn’t like it when I first read it, but loved it on my second attempt. It’s comforting in a very different way to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I can lose myself in Woolf’s writing but it’s more about the rhythm and the poetry of the language than in the sumptuousness of Victorian plots.

My other favourite Woolfs are A Room of One’s Own (there’s that feminism of mine again) and Orlando. I also heartily recommend Flush: A Biography, which I only read for the first time this year.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

“Sugar, an alluring, nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of 1870’s London society offers us intimacy with a host of loveable, maddening and superbly realised characters. At the heart of this panoramic, multi-layered narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter.”

My favourite contemporary novel, and by far the best neo-Victorian novel I have read so far. It’s got everything: brilliant characters, fantastic, Victorianesque plot, the backstreets of London, interesting points on class and sexism, and yup, a touch of the feminist in Sugar, a prostitute, who wants to revenge herself on all the men who have used her.

Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith

“Girl meets boy. It’s a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith’s re-mix of Ovid’s most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can’t be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.”

One of Canongate’s Myths series. I love Ali Smith generally – her collection Other Stories and Other Stories was what inspired me to name this blog – but this short novel is by far my favourite of her work. Now, I’m willing to admit that I cry very easily but I was practically sobbing at the sheer perfection of her words in this book. I completely and utterly adored it.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

A huge, rich, twisty, colourful, chunky, satisfying doorstep of a novel. Both fantastical (spontaneous human combustion, anyone?) and somehow grittily realistic when it comes to the grinding tedium of the Victorian legal system. I know some people don’t get along with Dickens, but you can’t deny he is a consummate story-teller, and sometimes, that’s just what you want.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, I cannot recommend the 2005 BBC television adaptation by Andrew Davies highly enough. Go now and get the DVDs if you haven’t. In my experience, TV versions of Dickens can be somewhat hit or miss, but this, with it’s half-hour long episodes, replicating the original feel of the serialization, is top notch. And what a cast, too.

The Daughters of Danaus by Mona Caird

Read originally as part of my MA in Victorian Studies, I wasn’t originally bowled over by it. I thought it very important and interesting from the perspective of the New Woman writers, but I didn’t necessarily love it. But, having decided to write on the New Woman writers for my dissertation, I went back to it, and it became – as they say – a grower. Now I completely love it, and I wish it were more widely available.

It’s ranty and political and feminist and late Victorian, and deals with how women were (are) classed by society. It also deals specifically with motherhood and feminism, which is a subject I’m particularly interested it. As the critic Ann Heilmann has said in her work, there are some fascinating parallels with this and the 1970s feminist text, Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich. If I ever go back to studying, I would love to work on Mona Caird. And she was Scottish!

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

I have my high school English teacher, Mrs Morning, to thank for introducing me to Margaret Atwood.

She recommended this book to me during my CSYS and I ended up writing my school dissertation on it (along with two other books). I had never read anything quite like this book before and I devoured it. Dystopic, feminist, brilliantly written… I know I sound like a broken record, but they are the things I like in a book! It may have been written in the 1980s and set in the ‘near future’ but now, nearly thirty years later, it feels as relevant as ever.

I thought the film was rubbish though…

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Everyone has a favourite book from their childhood and this is mine. I still have my battered copy with the pages falling out and the cover half hanging off. I wanted to be like Matilda. I loved books, I loved the library. I wanted her magic powers. I still do! Thankfully, I never had a headteacher as cruel as Miss Trunchbull…

And as for those Quentin Blake illustrations, how fantastic are they?!