International Women’s Day (March 8th) is a day to celebrate the achievements of women and raise awareness of the discrimination still faced by many women all over the world.
In celebration of IWD, we have put together a list of five recent or forthcoming novels which fictionalise the lives of real-life heroines – women who dared to be different and step outside of the gender roles they had been assigned.
Like Fire Hearted Suns
Melanie Joosten | Ultimo Press | March 2024 | Order HERE
London, 1908. It’s the dawn of a new century and change is in the air.
When 17-year-old Beatrice Taylor stumbles across the offices of the infamous Pankhursts and the Women’s Social and Political Union she begins to realise her future may not be the one she wants.
Her friend Catherine Dawson is too pragmatic to get caught up in the women’s suffrage movement. Despite Oxford refusing to award women degrees she is determined to keep apace with her twin brother and pursue a career in science.
Meanwhile, Ida Bennett, recently promoted to head wardress of DX wing at Holloway Prison, has her work cut out for her. The suffragette inmates are refusing to be treated like criminals—and Ida’s not having any of it.
This is the story of three women whose lives become entwined—with the burgeoning women’s movement and with each other. Like Fire-Hearted Suns shows how much things have changed for women—and how much they stay the same.
The Painter’s Daughters
Emily Howes | Phoenix Books (Hachette) | February 2024 | Order HERE
1759, Ipswich.
Sisters Peggy and Molly Gainsborough are the best of friends and do everything together. They spy on their father as he paints, they rankle their mother as she manages the books, they tear barefoot through the muddy fields that surround their home. But there is another reason they are inseparable: from a young age, Molly has had a tendency to forget who she is, to fall into mental confusion, and Peggy knows instinctively that no one must find out.
When the family move to Bath, the sisters are thrown into the whirl of polite society, where the merits of marriage and codes of behaviour are crystal clear, and secrets much harder to keep.
As Peggy goes to greater lengths to protect her sister from the threat of an asylum, she finds herself falling in love, and their precarious situation is soon thrown catastrophically off course. The discovery of a betrayal forces Peggy to question all she has done for Molly – and whether any one person can truly change the fate of another.
Chloe
Katrina Kell | Echo Publishing | February 2024 | Order HERE
A riveting novel based on the true story of the brave, enigmatic young woman who modelled for one of Australia’s most famous paintings.
Taking the reader from Victoria’s wild shipwreck coast to the artists’ studios of revolutionary Paris and the bloody battlefields of Flanders, this sweeping novel reimagines the volatile history of the beautiful and enigmatic young woman immortalised in one of Australia’s most iconic paintings. Created in Paris in 1875, Chloé, Jules Lefebvre’s depiction of a naked water nymph, was brought to Melbourne’s Young & Jackson Hotel in 1909, where it has hung ever since.
In this passionate, luminous retelling, Katrina Kell seeks to unlock the riddle behind the girl on the canvas, known to history only as Marie. In doing so, she weaves the compelling story of an incandescent spirit – a woman with the strength to defy the boundaries of class and convention in order to survive, and an enduring power to influence the lives of others across time and distance.
The Tower
Flora Carr | Penguin Random House Australia | March 2024 | Order HERE
They are imprisoned, but not contained.
Three women cross a loch. It is 1567, one of them is pregnant, two of them fretful. The boat takes them to Lochleven castle in the middle of the water. Awaiting them are courtiers braying for blood, hellbent on keeping one of them under lock and key: Mary Queen of Scots.
In the tower, Mary’s maids Frenchwoman, Cuckoo and watchful Scot, Jane are her only allies, and the chamber their entire world. A new reality sets in where they are at the mercy of not only their keepers, but of raging Scotland itself.
In the outside world, Mary’s kin, Queen Elizabeth claims she can do little but write. Downstairs, the shrewd jailor-courtier Margaret Erskine places her daughter-in-law Agnes in the chamber as her pair of eyes. Hope seems futile until the bewitching Lady Seton arrives. Seton’s power shifts everything in the tower and soon a plan is hatched. But which of them will risk it all to save their mistress? Which woman loves her queen best?
The Tower is a triumphant story of desire, grit, God-given power and wiles from a striking new voice in historical fiction.
Mary (or The Birth of Frankenstein)
Anne Eekhout | Pushkin Press | February 2024 | Order HERE
1816. Mary, eighteen years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities; haunted by the loss of her baby daughter.
Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary.
Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits. And she encountered real monsters – both in the rocky wilds, and far, far closer to home…
Illuminating the past like a flash of lightning, this brilliant reimagining of the birth of Frankenstein takes us into a feverish world of waking dreams-where grief mingles with desire, and the veil between beauty and horror grows thin.
Also out in the next couple of months are a couple of hotly anticipated releases from some of Australia’s best women writing today. If these titles leave you wanting more, why not check out the latest novel by Julie Jansson, Compassion, or stick a pre-order on the forthcoming novel by last year’s Miles Franklin Award winner, Shankari Chandran? Her third novel in as many years, Safe Haven, is out in May.
Or you can dip into the Stella Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlists, both of which were announced this week to coincide with IWD.
