An Orange Prize survey carried out in 2004 asked women for the books which had "which has spoken to you on a personal level. It may have changed the way you look at yourself or simply made you happy to be a woman. Your selection can be written by a man or a woman, in this country or abroad, as long as it touched your life in some way." The top five are below with the longlist following:
1.Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
2.Emily Bronte – Wuthering
Heights
3. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
4.George
Eliot – Middlemarch
5.Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
Toni
Morrison – Beloved
Douglas Adams – The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Louisa May
Alcott – Little Women
Maya Angelou – I Know why the Caged Bird
Sings
Jane Austen – Persuasion
Charlotte Bronte – Villette
Albert Camus – The Stranger
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss
F. Scott Fitzgerald –
The Great Gatsby
Gustav Flaubert – Madame Bovary
Jonathan Franzen
– The Corrections
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Frances
Hodgson-Burnett – The Little Princess
James Joyce – Ulysses
Jackie Kay – Trumpet
D.H Lawrence – The Rainbow
Harper
Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing – The Grass is Singing
C.S. Lewis – The Lion,
The Witch and The Wardrobe
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years
of Solitude
Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca
Margaret Mitchell –
Gone With the Wind
Marcel Proust – Remembrance of Things Past
J.D
Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Donna Tartt – The Secret History
J.R.R Tolkien – The Lord of
the Rings
Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
Edith Wharton – The
House of Mirth
Jeanette Winterson – Oranges are not the only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson – The Passion
Jeanette Winterson – The
Powerbook
Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway
Women customers at The Book Case have also suggested Joan Barfoot's "Gaining Ground" and Agnes Smedley's "Daughter of Earth". Further ideas welcome!