World Book Day is a bigger part of my life as a mother than it was for me as a child. It was first celebrated in 1998 when I was 14 and I don’t remember doing so at my school. Literature still featured highly, one of the many benefits of being at boarding school was having access to a library on-site, and we had the thrill of Dick King-Smith visiting us as juniors (a memory also tied up with eating homemade mint creams).

In 2024 International Women’s Day falls the day after World Book Day and it seems the planets are aligning for me to focus on female authors. I’m delighted that Lizzie Pepper, author of The Last Year Of The Wild series, is spending the day at my children’s primary school to share her forward-thinking environmental novels and speak about her journey as an author.

Thinking back to my own childhood, nearly all the books I remember reading are by women. The Little Grey Rabbit series by Alison Uttley, Brer Rabbit books by Enid Blyton, The Worst Witch and more by Jill Murphy, Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse by Ursula Moray Williams, The Tree That Sat Down by Beverley Nichols, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott spring quickly to mind.

The only exceptions to the predominantly female line up I can consciously drum up are Lewis Carroll, Dick King-Smith (of course), Roald Dahl and René Goscinny’s The Adventures of Asterix, probably because I shared the comics with my big brother, who is very close to me in age. It’s worth noting that the books I remember him reading (he’ll no doubt correct me) are the Adrian Mole series by Sue Townsend (note the male protagonist) and Dick Francis novels.

Jumping forward to the books I studied in senior school, for English A Level and for my Literature degree at university and the female voice nearly evaporates. Amidst the Hardy, Dickens, Chaucer, Milton, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Orwell, Donne, Johnson, Golding, Wordsworth and friends, Pope, Swift, Joyce, Owen, Sassoon and Tennyson there was Woolf and Carter and that’s it.

Word-bird-book-nerd that I am, I often read around a central text and also for pleasure, so I can add George Eliot AKA Mary Ann Evans, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Harper Lee and Iris Murdoch to the list of authors I devoured, but they weren’t officially on the syllabus. Thankfully, they’ve created the most wonderful tableaux in my mind’s eye, Eliot’s description of the child Eppie wandering into Silas Marner’s home on a winter’s night being probably the most vivid.

Winding forward to the literary world my children live in, there are some truly brilliant female authors populating their bedtime reading from Liz Pichon to Rachel Bright, Jill Murphy (still) to Susie Dent. David Walliams is also a current favourite, Daniel Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket, Tom Read Wilson and they’ve enjoyed the collaborative writing of Sue Hendra and Paul Linnet. I’m pleased that for my two boys anything goes.

For World Book Day this year they chose Dread Wood: Creepy Creations by Jennifer Killick and Can You Get Jellyfish in Space? by Dr Sheila Kanani with their £1 tokens. It’s a wonderful thing that the charity gives children the chance to own a book of their own through the token scheme (at my school you only got a book token if you won a prize). Library borrow, charity shop find or treasured gift, anything and anyone that promotes a love of reading gets my vote.

Photo by Kelli McClintock on Unsplash