Writer and novelist
How could a novel about young women working in New York six years after the end of the Second World War have any relevance to today’s 20-somethings in similar situations?
When the novel is Rona Jaffe’s The Best Of Everything (published 1958), the answer may surprise you. And what is even more surprising is that in many ways this book has more contemporary resonance than Sex And The City, its later, flashier, sister in the group-of-women-dealing-with-love and-work genre.
One of the 339 books referenced in the Gilmore Girls TV series is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 influential account of druggy trips and the growth of the hippie movement. Jess Mariano — well, who else — is seen reading it. A very Jess choice.
But it’s the other Wolfe whose words have particular resonance as we look forward to revisiting the Gilmores and Stars Hollow in Netflix’s new four-parter, Gilmore Girls, A Year in the Life.
A toothsome if uneven mix of espionage, Middle Eastern politics, kidnapping and the ever-fertile setting of an exclusive girls’ school makes Cat Among The Pigeons (1959) by Agatha Christie a rattling good read.
The plot hinges on a cache of jewels, worth about three quarters of a million pounds, which Ali Yusuf, Sheik of Ramat, wants to smuggle out of his country before he is captured or killed by revolutionary forces. He entrusts the jewels to his good friend Bob Rawlinson, who secrets them in the luggage of his sister and niece, Joan and Jennifer Sutcliffe.
The title of Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 children’s classic book Ballet Shoes exerts an irresistible pull on the psyche of young girls everywhere, as strong now as it ever was.
Stories about ballet schools promise a glut of tutus, leotards, satin shoes, backstage rivalry, exotic teachers called ‘madame’, stars in the making, moments in the limelight. For many post-war little girls, Ballet Shoes was our first taste of the heady delights of battements and barre work, which we would practise in our bedrooms on wobbly toes holding on to the back of a chair, dreaming of being the next Anna Pavlova or Margot Fonteyn.
I Capture The Castle, set in 1934 and written 12 years later when Dodie Smith was living in America and homesick for England, is studded with unexpected delights.
The framing device is a diary written by 17-year-old Cassandra, who describes the six months in the life of her family during which their fortunes change and she grows up.
Now, Voyager is a classic women’s picture, a melodrama, a three-hanky weepie. In many ways, it’s something of a mess, with separate stories and themes jostling for attention.
The 1942 film tells the story of Charlotte Vale, Boston heiress and downtrodden, dowdy maiden aunt driven over the edge of mental stability by her mother’s treatment of her.
Hands up, I wanted a happy ending to say goodbye to The Good Wife. Or at least a satisfying ending which signed off on an optimistic note and met my need to see equilibrium restored.
What we got was an unsettling, uncomfortable finale which brought the drama to a dark conclusion.
Who knew that someone actually created the beehive? The someone who did so was called Margaret Vinci Hedl, and she died recently on June 10, 2016.
In one form or another, this style has never gone out of fashion, although through the decades it has been very loosely interpreted.
Scheming women, stupid men, sex, money, power — Jane Austen’s juvenile work Lady Susan has all the elements which are to appear in her later novels.
This 1794 novella is in the form of letters exchanged between some of the characters, through which we trace the exploits of the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon as she engages in affairs with two men.
The L-Shaped Room, Lynne Reid Banks’ 1960 novel about the pregnancy of a young (ish) single mother, is a superb evocation of a time when women’s choices were limited and attitudes to sex and marriage had not yet been challenged by the ‘permissive’ 1960s.
Single mothers in the 1950s and 1960s faced prejudice and opprobrium, and were advised to hide their shame by pretending to be married or widowed. You could choose to confer a kind of legitimacy on the child by legally adopting it and giving it your name.
London was starting to swing in 1966 but away from the glamour there was widespread squalour that was shown unflinchingly by director Ken Loach in Cathy Come Home.
Cathy Come Home was first shown on the BBC as part of its Wednesday Play series. Written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach, who has just won the Palme D’Or for the second time in Cannes with his new film, I, Daniel Blake, depicting the injustices of the UK benefits system.
Long before there was the global franchise — now in its 54th year — and before James Bond became a product to be presented and reinvented over and over again, there were the novels by Ian Fleming.
I found Dr No in the secondhand book trough at the end of our road, and read it in a couple of days on the train journey to school. It was sufficiently engrossing and captivating to lead me to a few more Bond books, which I read with equal enjoyment.
