7 Books Like Miss Dior

My choices this year are all connected with war. Susan Hill is also the author of The Woman in Black, a scary ghost story which I couldn’t put down, and which was – perhaps still is – a terrifying theatrical experience (apparently – I haven’t dared see it).

She wrote Strange Meeting as a very young woman. It is a graphic account of being a young English officer on the front line during the First World War. No detail is spared. We are down the trenches, then, after an anguished wait, "over the top," to where the enemy waits to mow the soldiers down…

You can feel the agony, sometimes physical, always mental, that stays with them day and night. The horrors are almost worse in that the characters have strong feelings for each other. The heroes, two young officers, love each other deeply and tenderly (though completely platonically),… show more.

Published in 1926, this book allows us to glimpse what it was really like being a woman in Britain in the years after the Great War.

Lolly, a meek spinster, is a subordinate member of a stiflingly conventional, well-bred family. But deep inside, she is wild and rebellious. She finally escapes to the country and becomes a witch, a follower of Satan, and this, paradoxically, is her salvation.

The earlier pages, depicting her daily life, are especially riveting – every detail has a precious period feel. The outstanding quality of this book is the limpid, seemingly simple accuracy of every sentence, often needle-sharp, often paradoxical: the women "find consolation in consoling each other"; Lolly reads in secret, "undisturbed, and without disturbing anybody." Or, talking of the daily functioning of the household, "unseen and underground, the preparation and demolition of everyday went on…" Every sentence needs to be savoured.

A small… show more.

I grew up reading Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, and found this book about the woman who changed his life riveting.

I also loved it because Stevenson sails to French Polynesia and I have sailed to French Polynesia and written a book about it. So there are many connections for me. Plus, it’s about the real life of scorned woman, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne who flees San Francisco and her philandering husband and eventually falls in love with Stevenson.

An adventure that is history. Yes please! 

Elizabeth Berg wanted to read a novel about George Sand but couldn’t find one…and so she wrote it herself. In The Dream Lover, Berg unfolds the story of Aurore Dupin, who boldly left a loveless aristocratic marriage to make her own way in 19th-century Paris. She adopts the pen name George Sand and becomes France’s bestselling female novelist, living a bohemian lifestyle and scandalizing society by having high-profile love affairs and, even more outrageously, by dressing in men’s clothing. I love stories about trailblazing women, and Berg compellingly conveys how risky and courageous Sand’s actions were at a time when women had few rights.

I deliberately read The Mystery of Mrs. Christie slowly so that I could savor the story longer. The novel alternates chapters between present-day 1926, after famous novelist Agatha Christie has disappeared and sparked a headline-making manhunt in England, and the decade or so leading up to it. The story of her disappearance and the possible reasons behind it is intriguing, but I especially enjoyed the chapters set in the past and getting to know Agatha as a young woman and an aspiring writer.

Daphne has numerous elements that I particularly adore in a story: a classic writer as a character, an English manor house setting, and a mystery. Layer in a Brontë connection, and it’s a perfectly pleasing literary page-turner. In 1957, Daphne du Maurier is at her remote, seaside mansion in Cornwall, distracting herself from personal woes by researching a biography about Branwell Brontë, reprobate and possibly misunderstood brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Intertwined is a second storyline set in present-day London, as a lonely young woman, newly married to a mysterious older man seemingly still in thrall to his first wife, becomes caught up in a fifty-year-old mystery involving du Maurier and the Brontës. 

“Long ago Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer.” Vanessa and Her Sister is a portrait of two extraordinary and unconventional women, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. The story is told in the form of a diary kept by Vanessa, beginning at the turn of the 20th century with the formation of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Priya Parmar has created a sympathetic yet honest portrayal of Virginia Woolf, her genius and her often precarious mental state, and the impact it had on her family—in particular Vanessa, who was an important and steadying influence for her sister and a talented artist in her own right.