Top ten books about women in the 1950s

Virginia Nicholson is the author of Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s.

At the Guardian, she tagged her ten top books about women in the 1950s, including:

Small Island by Andrea Levy

This indelibly impressive novel excavates the roots of Britain’s postwar multicultural society. When I came to research the period, immigrant women I spoke to told me “we thought England was the Mother Country”. In Small Island, Hortense Joseph discovers, like so many of them, cold, fear and hostility. But there is another side to the story. Some Jamaican women I interviewed felt released from the restraints of their strict religious upbringing. For one, arrival in the UK in the late ‘50s felt like being let loose “in a candy shop”.

Read about another entry on the list.

Small Island is among Martin Fletcher's five best books on nations and lives in transition and Gillian Cross's top ten books that throw everything you think you know upside down.

--Marshal Zeringue