Muriel, who believes that ‘men do as they like’ whereas women ‘wait to see what they will do’, lives in a town in Yorkshire waiting – for what? She tries to conform to the values of her snobbish, socially ambitious mother; she tries to be ‘attractive’ to men.Throughout the description of life in small-town ‘Marshington’, Winifred Holtby expressed her conviction that young women should be allowed to live away from home, to work, to develop as personalities away from their families, to shake off the ties that many mothers seemed to think it was their prerogative to impose on their daughters.

    It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet the title of the book is based on a Carlyle quotation – ‘Experience doth take dreadfully high wages, but she teacheth like none other’ – and Jane, having saved some money and been lent some by a friend, opens her own dress-shop.As Jane Brocket writes in her Persephone Preface: the novel ‘is a celebration of the Lancastrian values of hard work and stubbornness, and there could be no finer setting for a shop-girl-made-good story than the county in which cotton was king.’

    With surgical precision it charts the destructive emotional war between a young woman, her husband and his disruptive brother as they move through a labyrinth of betrayal, alienation and lost connections. This revised edition has lost none of Angela Carter's haunting power to evoke the ebb of the 1960s, and includes an afterword which describes the progress of the survivors into the anguish of middle age.

    But her favourite among her books was Consequences (1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets everything wrong; she refuses to marry the only young man who ‘offers’ and believes there is nothing left for her but to enter a convent. But that is not quite the end of her tragic story. Nor was it for EM Delafield, who also entered a convent for a year; but in her case she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD in an army hospital, ‘which was emancipation of the most delirious kind. It was occupation, it was self-respect.’Like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, written at the same time, Consequences is a scream of horror against Victorian values; however, its ironic tone cannot disguise EM Delafield’s deeply compassionate and feminist stance.

    Byatt's short fictions, collected in paperback for the first time, explore the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss and the elaborate memories we construct against it, resulting in a book that compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder.

    But as WWII overtakes the country, the family, like so many others, slowly disintegrates. Told partly from the perspective of the children, but not a children's book, Saplings is immensely readable . . . a dark inversion of the author’s best-known book, the children’s classic Ballet Shoes.

    Their uneventful but always interesting everyday life is the main subject of a novel that evokes the charmingly contented and timeless while managing to be both funny and profound about human relations.

    Now thirty-seven, her lack of prospects hasn’t dimmed her spirit or appetite for life. So when Susan asks her to come to France for the summer to persuade her grandmother to allow her to marry her fiancé, Julia sets sail with the noblest intentions of being a paragon of motherhood.   But at her mother-in-law’s vacation villa in Haute Savoie, Julia sees that her priggish but lovely daughter is completely mismatched with a man who is just like herself: a charming, clever playboy. The arrival of Susan’s legal guardian, the distinguished Sir William Waring, further complicates the situation. Soon Julia’s efforts to pass herself off as a lady and secure her daughter’s happiness spin out of control, leading to romantic entanglements and madcap adventures that challenge preconceived notions about the ultimate compatibility of any two people who fall in love.

    The Evening Standard described Bilgewater as "one of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love."Motherless and 16, Marigold is the headmaster's daughter at a private backwater all-boys school. To make matters worse, Marigold pines for head boy Jack Rose, reckons with the beautiful and domineering Grace, and yanks herself headlong out of her interior world and into the seething cauldron of adolescence. With everything happening all at once, Marigold faces the greatest of teenage crucibles. A smart and painterly romp in the rich tradition of The Hollow Land and A Long Way From Verona, Gardam's elegant, evocative prose, possessed of sharp irony and easy surrealism makes Bilgewater a book for readers of all ages.

    A respected lawyer who survived two marriages and put two children through college, she now faces the disquieting prospect of her wayward older daughter moving back home. But more troubling still is the news that her mother, a woman of legendary independence who has never truly accepted her daughter nor approved of her choices, has been felled by age and illness. And, for the first time in her life, she needs Suzanne's help.Intertwining the lives of three generations of contemporary women, master storyteller Marge Piercy plunges into the deepest, most elemental basics of life -- love, aging, illness, and death -- and emerges with a brave, compassionate exploration of the volatile ground between mothers and daughters.

    Stuck in a passionless marriage, Arthur becomes infatuated with Annabel, a much younger woman. Their relationship sets into motion a series of intertwining affairs between five close friends less concerned with love than with their attempts to keep the other lovers apart.

    She lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without 'coupons', and she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals.

    Relentlessly good-natured, surprisingly successful, lapped by the affection of her children and friends and intidily folded into the clutter of her overflowing house, Kate is now suddenly in her forties.Margaret Drable takes Kate's predicament - when Kate is forced to make a reconnaissance of the middle ground of her life - and turns it into a wise, witty and ebullient novel.

    The tough, severe, but very real and recognizable world of women is put to the most strenuous tests, and Liza, at eighty-four, is proof that loyalty, fortitude and humor survive.

    The King first noticed her when she was 16 - and with imperial greed he smashed her youthful love-affair with Harry Percy and began the process of royal seduction. But this was no ordinary woman, no maid-in-waiting to be possessed.