For a focus on a woman linked to a famous man: One of the problems I have with books about women connected to famous men is that sometimes the author is really using the woman to write about the man. However, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin, 1991) by Claire Tomalin, is more up front about the balance.

For expansion of facts in the cleanest of prose: Kate Summerscale’s Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (Bloomsbury, 2013) is the very opposite of the ubiquitous Country Diary of an Edwardian Diary.

For honesty (and mythmaking): I first read Lorna Sage’s memoir Bad Blood in 2016 (4th Estate, 2000). With masterly craft, Sage described the emotional legacy of her typical English-middle-class dysfunctional family – demonstrating no family is typical, and no girl escapes her family’s particular brand of madness.

For a fresh female perspective on stale male history: Janina Ramirez’s Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It (Penguin, 2022) is true to its title and cover. The front image is unabashedly the shape of a reproductive organ as if the book is about to birth these women anew. It does.

For cliffhangers at the end of every chapter: Catherine Bailey has long been a favourite author of mine for her pacy style and the way she ends chapters. In The Lost Boys (Viking, 2019), she tells the story of Fey von Hassell, the daughter of the man who tried to assassinate Hitler.

For resurrecting women in a whole section of literature: Ramie Targoff’s Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance (Riverrun, 2024) is a blast of feisty fresh air into the annals of the history of Renaissance literature.

For images essential to narrative: In Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Living Persons (Vintage, 2020) the author searches for why her mother went temporarily missing as a child.

For a sense of place: The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History (4th Estate, 2018) by Guardian journalist, Aida Edemariam, is a work of art and an offering of love to Ethiopia and her grandmother.

For form matching theme: Until 2022, I had never heard of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (Picador, 2015), a book that won the National Book Critics Circle Award when it was originally published in the States (Vintage, 1976).