Millie is currently reading: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

With it currently being summative season, the idea of reading for pleasure is a distant memory. However, I have wormed one of my favourite novels into my summative for the Feminist Writing module. This short story depicts an unsettling narrative told by a nameless woman confined to an attic nursery, who is dealing with severe mental illness after the birth of her child. Gilman’s description of what the woman sees in the yellow wallpaper still sends shivers down my spine!

Tshequa is currently reading: The Emperors Babe by Bernadine Evaristo

As with Millie and Sophie, I too am reading for my essays. I can only dream of reading outside of uni related books!! However, The Emperors Babe, which I’m currently re-reading, is an amazing book set in Roman Londinium, and explores the more recent DNA evidence of Black people in Roman London — disproving the accepted narrative that Black people only arrived in large numbers from the 1940s. There’s a lot of interesting context which I can’t fit in here, but definitely worth a read!

Sophie is currently reading: The Woman of Colour

With my final year drawing to a close, and summative season stealing all of our free time, I’ve fallen into the habit of skipping seminars to work on deadlines. It wasn’t until my lecturer reminded us that our essays needed to compare three books I realised they were three books I hadn’t yet read. I’m currently reading (catching up on) The Woman of Colour, an anonymous epistolary novel, following the daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner on her voyage across the Atlantic to marry her English cousin. With the joys of comparing it to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, I look forward to uncovering what made this novel so groundbreaking.