Written by a leading academic and broadcaster and drawing on interviews with readers, writers, reading groups, bookshop owners, librarians, and figures from literary publishing, reviewing, and festivals, this accessible volume offers an overview of the contemporary scene of women's novel-reading.

Helen Taylor is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Exeter, Honorary Fellow of the British Association of American Studies, and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow 2016-18. She has taught English and American literature at the universities of the West of England, Bristol, Warwick, and Exeter, where she was Head of the School of English. A specialist in literature and culture of the American South and women's writing, she has published widely in both areas. Her books include Scarlett's Women: Gone With the Wind and its Female Fans (1989, reprinted 2014), Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (2001), and The Daphne du Maurier Companion (2007), as well as a BFI Film Classic on Gone With the Wind (2015). Curator, Chair, and participant in many literature festivals, she was the first Director of the Liverpool Literary Festival, 2016 and 2018.

• Preface: 'A Friend, a Bible, a Perfume'


• Part One: How, Where, and Why Women Read Fiction


• Introduction


• 1: 'Cheap Sweet Vacations': Reading as a Woman


• 'What Their Books Yield or, Why I am Not Buying a Kindle'


• Part Two: What Women Read


• 2: Reading as a Girl


• The Poet on her childhood reading


• 3: Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, the Novels Women Love Best


• 4: Romance and Erotica: Fiction by Women for Women


• 5: Women, Crime, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy


• The Literary Blogger


• Part Three: Writers and Readers


• 6: Women Writers on their Reading and Readers


• 7: Book Clubs in Women's Life Stories


• 8: Festivals, Literary Tourism, and Pilgrimage


• Fiction in Lives, Lives in Fiction


• 9: The Stories of Our Lives


• Appendix: Questionnaire about women's fiction reading