The Books of My Life - Guest post by Kate Jones

A reflection on the books that made me a writer

Welcome to Beyond the Bookshelf, a community of readers and writers sharing unique perspectives on life and literature through thought-provoking essays, captivating interviews, and influential books as we explore the challenges of life's transformative journey.

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Dear Readers,

This week, I am sharing with you the first guest post I have hosted here on Beyond the Bookshelf. Sharing your publication with another writer is an act of trust, and I am happy to say that Kate has earned mine. Her publication, A Narrative of Their Own, was the first that I supported through a paid subscription. I have been blessed to read her work on 20th-century Women and Contemporary Culture during these past seven months. I hope you enjoy her essay.

Kate Jones is an essayist from the city of Sheffield in the UK which, sitting right alongside the Peak District National Park, boasts the title of the second greenest city in Europe.  A mother of two, she shares a sunny apartment with her husband and teenager, her eldest child having flown the nest.  She divides her time between researching the often untold stories of women and considering their impact on contemporary issues while also working part-time as an administrator in the National Health Service.  This, she thinks, helps to keep her grounded.  She is a keen walker, yoga enthusiast, and of course, reader. Here she reflects on the books that made her a writer.

Kate Jones

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

I inherited a love of this classic story from my mother, who shared it with me as a child.  I had an ‘easy reader’ version of the book at first, which had black and white drawings you could colour in as you read.  We shared the book at bedtimes, and I was an early reader, soon devouring this by myself, as well as many others which were also my mother’s favourites.  The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was another big favourite, as were My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards, What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge and The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton.

I loved stories of rebellious girls who refused to be quiet and sit in the corner.  Looking back, I think this was already setting the stage for my interest in women’s narratives and feminist literature!

Little Women tells the story of the March family during the American Civil War and like many other young girls who loved to write, I associated myself with Jo March, who sits in her attic alcove and pens stories of mystery and horror.  I wanted to be a writer or journalist from a young age, and Jo’s passion for writing burned into my brain like no other character I have encountered since.  

I also have huge, fond memories tied up with this book: my mother and I used to watch one of the film adaptations every Christmas, with our favourite being the black and white, 1933 Katherine Hepburn version.  As I lost my mother twenty years ago, the films and book have remained a bitter-sweet reminder of those times, snuggled up together on the sofa every December.

This Christmas, my grown daughter and I watched the newest adaptation of the book by director Greta Gerwig, and she later bought me a beautiful new edition of the book and the Katherine Hepburn original adaptation.  The book feels like a legacy carried forward from my childhood and now into my life as a mother of grown children myself.

Deenie by Judy Blume

I fell headlong into Judy Blume’s entire oeuvre when I became an adolescent.  I think Deenie is probably my favourite of all time, because I loved the way Blume gave us a girl who had a health condition that meant she struggled to meet the traditional beauty standards and family expectations of her.

Deenie has to wear an ugly back brace to correct a problem with her spine, and all this at a time when she is just discovering boys and all the complications of a young girl going through puberty, as well as being known as ‘the pretty one’ of two sisters.  

I also loved Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret, which is probably Blume’s most famous novel and really all her young teenage stories show the difficulties of growing up and not fitting in.  This resonated with me in my adolescence, as I know it did for millions of other young girls growing up in the 1980s, when gender politics were complicated and it was still seen as ‘acceptable’ to favour men in jobs, schooling, and life in general.  I wanted to grow up and re-write the narrative.  Judy Blume gave me the courage to see that I wasn’t ‘weird’ for how I felt, or for not fitting in.  

As an adjunct, I finally met Judy Blume a few years ago when she visited the UK to promote her adult novel In the Unlikely Event.  She was as wonderful and gracious as I always hoped, and queuing up with my battered old copy of Margaret for her to sign, I felt as awestruck as I would have as a teenager! 

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

This may seem like an unusual choice for a scholar of modernist literature!  But it was this book that actually set me on the path to finally sharing my writing.

I read Gilbert’s book in my late thirties as I was approaching forty, and although her life looked totally different to mine - I was married with two young children and living in suburbia, whereas she was newly divorced, childless, and embarking on a solo trip to three continents - her spiritual awakening mirrored my waking up to my own needs and desires to write.

Although I am not remotely a spiritual or religious person, I appreciated the way Gilbert felt the need to take herself away in order to grow.  I could see that turning down the noise was something that I needed to do in order to believe in my own abilities to share my writing with others.  I began keeping tiny notebooks of my daily life; thoughts, ideas, and tiny writing sketches of the people I observed around me in daily life, just as she did on her travels.  

It would take me crossing over the boundary of forty to finally get up the courage to share my words with others, but it all started in these small notebooks.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley

I came across Grace Paley’s short story collection in my local Oxfam store, where I was working as a volunteer.  I later sought out more about the writer’s work, and discovered an interview with her where she stated that, as a young mother, she had no time to write ‘important’ novels like many of her male contemporaries.  What she did instead was to write about the people who were all around her; mostly the other young mothers, but also her friends, neighbours, and relatives in the Jewish-American neighbourhood in which she lived.

What she did, she said, was write tiny sketches about these people and herself, eventually publishing them as very short, fictionalised portraits of the life around her.  She never wrote a novel, despite being asked for one by her publishers, and she had a long break between her two collections of stories, doing, as she put it, ‘the important business of raising children’.  

When I read and heard her speaking about this, an alarm went off in my head: this is what I have been doing all along!  

I began to unpick the ‘stories’ and sketches in those tiny notebooks and formed them into micro fictions, creative non-fiction narratives, and articles for submission to online journals.

Of course, I experienced many rejections.  But eventually, I began getting published, and people began responding positively to my work.  I wrote some critical essays about the women writers I admired, and began writing a regular feature about women short story writers on The Short Story website.  I also wrote an essay paying homage to Grace Paley which was shortlisted for an academic competition and published on their website.

My confidence in sharing my words and the value this had was growing, thanks to the discovery via Paley that you don’t have to be writing ‘great literature’ in order to be a writer.  You just have to share the truth as you see it.  

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

In my forties, I finally gained my Bachelors in English Literature as a mature student, something I had always dreamed of doing.  I had loved every second of my studies and knew that I was thirsty for more knowledge.  My own writing was growing, but I felt that I wanted to focus more on the literary criticism and research into women’s narratives, writing essays on both this and contemporary issues that affected women in society.

I have chosen The Awakening when I could have easily chosen any number of other texts, because it opened my eyes to the ways in which women’s stories of the past have often shown the punishment of women who choose to subvert the normal expectations of their gender or class.  In this novel, the protagonist Edna Pontellier leaves her children and husband to live alone and become an artist.  She wants independence and to earn her own living, as well as take a younger lover.  She is ultimately punished for this behaviour in a way that was often more celebrated, or at least condoned, for male protagonists.  

Chopin’s novel was banned for her portrayal of a woman who chooses her own path, and fell into obscurity until it was discovered by a scholar and republished to a more receptive, modern audience.  This showed me how important it was to share such stories of women’s often forgotten but no less valuable narratives.

The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden

Having a passion to study more women’s literature, I embarked on a Masters in English Studies and specialised in women’s twentieth-century, modernist fiction.  My dissertation examined nursing memoirs of WWI, and in particular, Mary Borden’s fractured sketches of running a war hospital at la zone interdite.  Borden chose to fictionalise her ‘memoirs’, in part, I suggested in my dissertation, as a way to deal with the trauma of civilian PTSD from her experiences.  She was still refused publication for many years, only gaining this once male writers came forward with their own critical novels on the war, such as Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. 

I realised that there were so many women’s stories out there encapsulating the realities of women’s lives, both of the past and the present.  

As I also love reading contemporary stories of women and the issues they are still facing, I decided to set up a newsletter looking at both women’s lives and stories of the past, and combining these with the contemporary issues facing women in today’s society.  My Substack ‘A Narrative of their Own’ was born, taking its name from Virginia Woolf’s famous speech and text,  A Room of One’s Own, in which she argues that women, often besieged by duty and responsibility for others, required a room of their own and an independent income in which to write.

Through my Substack newsletter, I feel that I have found my ‘room’ in which to write and share the words of brilliant women, many of whom often went unrecognised in their lifetimes, as well as celebrating the women who are out there making a difference today.

I love this platform, and I can see that my reading life up to this point has led me to this place, and this community.  Thank you for allowing me to reflect on the books that made me a writer, Matthew!

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You can read more of Kate’s writing on her publication.

Until next time…