National Velvet by Enid Bagnold

Velvet Brown has an impossible dream: to ride the Grand National, Britain’s toughest horse race. Her mother, who was once a cross-Channel swimmer, stands up to her husband and uses her own prize money to give her daughter her chance. Mothers and daughters are usually problematic in fiction and I love the way this mother facilitates her daughter’s dream.

Emma by Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse fancies herself as a matchmaker and decides to take her new friend Harriet Smith under her wing. Her attempts to find Harriet a suitable husband are well-meant but will ultimately alter the course of both their lives, especially when Emma realizes that Mr. Knightley, the man Harriet thinks she’s fallen for, is the man Emma herself is in love with.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Celie, a poor and abused young black woman, is married off to Mister and discovers that he has a long-term mistress, Shug Avery. A lesser writer would have had these women as each other’s enemies, but it is Shug who stops Mister beating Celie.

And it’s through her love for Shug that Celie is first emboldened, and then empowered, to take charge of her own life and be reunited with her lost sister.

Neopolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante’s novels are the first time I have really seen the complexities of a long, close, female friendship represented in print. You are locked into the world of these two women and a friendship that lasts from childhood through adulthood, which manages to combine love, admiration, envy, and hatred, often all at the same time.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

This is the story of the 1920s friendship of two women in Alabama—the impossibly brave tomboy, Idgie, and Ruth—told in the modern day to a third woman, Evelyn Couch, whose rather downtrodden and unhappy life is altered forever by the stories she hears, and by the kindness of the woman telling them.

This is a story of deep love between women, and of how we can be inspired by other women.