A second excerpt from my ms Kilea today. In this part of the novel, Kilea is ten or so. She is being looked after in the home of her housekeeper, and having behaved well is rewarded with a visit to a previously unseen part of the house, the unused attic space. The housekeeper, Mrs Sabine,…

When you were little, did you want to run away and join the circus? Did you want to run away off into the night, scram out across the fields, trailing comets behind you? Come take a stranger’s hand and let the fairy tale, and the charmer (death?) take you beyond the tricks of the everyday,…

A piece of creative nonfiction today from Ashley C. Ford. As with everything I’ve read by her – writing, posts on her blog, lengthy discussions on The Female Gaze (to which we both contribute) – when I read this, I couldn’t take my eyes of the page. Read right to the end, a light burning…

A perfectly joyous and askew collection of flash fictions for the autumn weather today. The writer Hilary Smith was once known as THE INTERN, and while her blog was marked by sharp insights and warm humour (+many other lovely adjectives, of course, but these two for now), I think it’s her fiction that charms me…

A personal essay today, from Kristen Stone. If you’ve ever suffered from anxiety (I have), you’ll know a little of this feeling – the overwhelming sense of your own vulnerability – and worse, that of those around you. How it can spill over into ritualistic behaviours, crossing the border between the acceptable and unacceptable fears.…

Some Girl Lit from me again. An excerpt from my ms Flesh of the Peach, which I completed just over a month ago. It’s a novel of flight, guilt, love and lovelessness. Sarah Brown is an older girl – late twenties, just at the border of accepted girlness. She qualifies, I feel. A girl holding…

Below is a tense piece of the domestic from Laura Tansley. I love her use of detail of life in an early nineties household, and the subtle ramping of stress between the woman and girls, even as they are introduced as a single unit – it appears as if they are, in fact – like…

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan + How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland Girl lit we’ve covered. So what’s a bad girl and how do we talk about her fictionality? Oh, you know, employ stretchy terminology. Ping the elastic with your teeth. So let us say to begin, a bad girl is someone who…

This is an excerpt from a novel ms entitled Rambler. Rice writes with fine-tuned sensitivity to how natural landscapes shape identity. I’m watching the grey autumn rains fall here, but here’s the alchemy of fiction, the transmutation of senses: I can feel instead the desert heat, see the glints off a hot car chassis, the…

Below is a story of teenage self-destruction, rock and roll, drugs and punch ups – a fairytale of all these things, from the hand of Kirsty Logan, fellow The Female Gaze Review writer and inhabitant of Scotland. She writes lustily and skewed, injecting old forms with modern feeling. And in her explorations of marginal spaces,…

The first essay on Literature of the Girl! At first sight, these two novels seem to be without a great deal of overlap, but they do have one theme in common – relationships, and specifically, the liminal time before and while a girl is betrothed. I use betrothed for its dusty, weighty quality, hinting at…