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When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.

I'd always read omnivorously and often thought much literary fiction is read by young men and women in their 20s as substitutes for experience.

'Jane Eyre' must have been something I read six or seven times as an early adolescent. And 'Kristin Lavransdatter,' and 'Lorna Doone' when I was younger. My parents had a pretty rich library, no jackets on any of the books, so no descriptions. You just pulled something off the shelf and started to read it.

I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.

My favourite books are Charles Bukowski's 'Post Office' and 'Women.'

Yeah, I read Judy Blume. My mother didn't like that, but I read it anyhow.

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.