International Women's Day

And another bookish blip. A collection and celebration of some of the women who have inspired me. In books, writers Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf; feminists Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and the poet Adrienne Rich. Ray Strachey's The Cause is there to represent all the many women who fought for us to have the vote.

And the female line in my own family: my great-grandmother, who died aged 91 the year before I was born, having brought up thirteen children; my grandmother, a rebel who travelled, married and was widowed in 1929 when my mother was four and then worked hard all her life, outspokenly annoying many but always herself. I didn't appreciate her enough when she was alive - I was 20 when she died - but I have done since and wrote a poem sequence In Sight of the Sea about her life. My mother who was a feminist before the second wave of the 1960s, an independent artist who travelled with my father to North Africa and Turkey where we lived, but who chose to travel alone or with women friends to Russia, India and China after her retirement. The photo of her on an elephant with her equally intrepid friend Kate was taken when she was in India. And then on to the future, at the right of the picture, my daughter is represented by a card of the Al Hambra she made me. She lives, works and travels independently (sometimes with her partner, but always on her own terms), carrying on the strong female line, but unfortunately still confronting some of the same old problems for women.