Watershed Novels

We have been discussing Award and Gender on the "Prizes" group and a user gave us a link for this interesting article. I thought readers in this group would find it very interesting. The idea of watershed novels is also interesting. So, here's the link. After you read the story, post what you think any of your watershed novels would be....

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1747927,00.html

Although I'm not entirely comfortable with how they define a watershed novel, I do have novels which have powerfully affected me and been important at various times in my life. They would be:

Little Women, Jane Eyre, Doctor Zhivago, The Handmaid's Tale and The Idea of Perfection.

While my first four are readily familiar, the last might not be. It's a story about history (all kinds) and baggage (it's also the quirkiest middle-aged love story I've ever read). And actually, all five books are still important to me.

Hmmm, quite a tough one. There are a lot of books that have affected me deeply (not all by, or to do with, women) so it's really a question of which particularly stand out. I remember reading The Women's Room in my early twenties (don't do the sums PLEASE) and feeling I had finally found the book that would change my life. It certainly altered or consolidated my outlook on a lot of things but I'm not sure whether I'd still feel that way now about it (it's on my list to re-read but I keep buying new ones and never getting round to those). Middlemarch has to be another, though - to be fair- Middlemarch comes up on all my lists of anything good, and also Iris Murdoch's The Bell.

All of these have affected me in many different but profound ways and have integrated themselves into my innermost philosophies of life. I'm sure there are others and, of course, it's what I hope for every time I pick up a new book.

The Woman's Room was really the first book that I had read that spoke to me as a woman.
Although I haven't re-read it in the intervening years, I heard it dramatised on Radio 4 last year and it is very much a piece of social history which still has resonances today.

Like Avaland, I don't like the way they define watershed novel. I don't rely on books to get me through difficult times in my life. Isn't that what Billie Holliday's music is for? Anyway, I would define watershed novels as ones that changed my perspective or spoke to me in some meaningful way. For me, that list would be The Clown by Heinrich Boll, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle and Possession by A.S. Byatt. Clearly I'm going to have to keep reading because I really need to add more female authors to that list.