Virago anniversary: female writers pick favourite books Anne Enright on Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley (1974) They say Grace Paley's characters don't talk like New Yorkers, they talk with the particular accent of a few blocks in the Bronx. This is a book of short stories about the lives of women and children in the big city. It is set in parks and playgrounds and on brownstone steps. I came across Paley's work when I was mad for fragments, because they seemed more intensely true to me. She reminds me of the Russian writer Isaac Babel and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. All three came from Russian shtetls. The shadow of Yiddish is in their sentences, and there is something ragged, provisional and completely real about their prose. These wise, small stories feel almost unfinished until you realise what Paley is saying: 'This is all I know about this important thing. This is all you get. Anne Enright's latest novel Forgotton Waltz is published by Vintage at £8.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) Lucy Mangan on Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King (1985) I was 11 when I first discovered this semi-autobiographical account of Florence King's upbringing in the southern states of America by her tomboy mother Louise, her British father Herb and - bestriding them all like a corseted colossus - her indefatigable grandmother. It supplanted all other contenders as the funniest book I had ever read. But more than that, it was my saviour. Beneath the jokes lay a rigorous dissection of femininity in the 1950s and - I gradually realised as King articulated the same set of miseries, bafflements and misunderstandings between her and the 'successfully" socialised girls at her school as I was confronting at mine - in the 1980s. It was the first book to give me what all the best books give readers: insight, and the comfort and courage that proceed from evidence that we are not alone. Lucy Mangan's latest novel The Reluctant Bride is published by John Murray Publishers at £9.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) Lionel Shriver on The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920) I love virtually all of Edith Wharton, but this one's my favourite. As ever her prose style is artful rather than arty. She's eloquent but never fussy, and always clear. She never seems to write well to show off. This is a poignant story about a man who seems happily married, but then falls fatally in love with a woman whose own broken marriage has marked her as a social pariah. It illustrates the bind both sexes find themselves in when trapped between the demands of convention and the demands of the heart. The novel is romantic but not sentimental, and I'm a sucker for unhappy endings. Wharton is something of an icon for me, a lone female writer in an era dominated by heavy-hitting males. Her skilful portrayal of the early 1900s helps me to appreciate our staggering good fortune, ladies, to live a century later. Lionel Shriver's latest book Big Brother is published by Harper Collins at £14.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) Naomi Alderman on All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West (1931) I was 22 when I first read All Passion Spent. Too young, one might think, for a novel about the end of life. All I knew about Vita Sackville-West was her affair with Virginia Woolf. But picking the book up in my local library, I loved it from the first lines.The great statesman the Earl of Slane has died at 94. His widow, Lady Slane, refuses her children's decorous suggestions for her own last years and instead moves to bohemian Hampstead, makes eccentric friends and lives exactly as she pleases.There are so few great novels about the end of things, so few which address the most important question of all, in a way - what is the best way to take your leave of the world? Sackville-West's answer is human, comforting, profound. Naomi Alderman's latest novel The Liar's Gospel is published by Penguin at £8.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) L-R: Barbara Comyns who wrote 'Our Spoons Came From Woolworths'; Willa Carter, author of 'The Professor's House' Maggie O'Farrell on Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns (1950) I have a habit of scouring shelves in second-hand bookshops for the dark-green spines of the original Virago Modern Classics and instantly buying up any I don't already own. I happened upon Barbara Comyns's Our Spoons Came From Woolworths in this way. I defy anyone to read the opening pages and not be instantly hooked by the frank, intimate, disgressive voice of the narrator. You will be told about a betrothal, a newt in a water jug, a medium's trance, a passionate family row. What I find most absorbing about the book is the disparity between tone and content. The light, often witty narration belies the darker forces at work here, namely the difficult dichotomy of a woman who is both an artist and a mother and the hardship of life in bohemian 1930s London. It is, I think, the book I have bought most often as a gift. Maggie O'Farrell's latest book Instructions for a Heatwave is published by Headline at £7.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) Polly Samson on The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter (1967) It could be almost any Angela Carter - I love every word - but this was my first and I read it around the age of Melanie in the novel, fearful on the brink between child and woman. Melanie at 15 is 'pregnant with herself, bearing the slowly ripening embryo of Melanie-grown-up inside..." She cavorts among the innocent blooms of her childhood and the writing teeters between waking and dreaming. Teeters" is entirely the wrong word, of course, this being Angela Carter: it sizzles and sparks and burns, both hallucinatory and profound. Angela Carter was 'the Godmother" of Virago, there from the beginning, advising, contributing. This allegorical tale of a young girl coming of age in a patriarchal society seems a good one to celebrate here. Polly Samson's novel Perfect Lives is published by Virago at £7.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) Fay Weldon on The Group by Mary McCarthy (1963) Mary McCarthy, a critic, satirist, activist and author, wrote this in 1963. It was an international success (being banned in Australia helped) condemned by men and women both for its sexual frankness. For me it was an eye-opener. The literature I had been brought up to respect was written by dead white males - this was taken seriously yet written by a living female. I could even recognise myself in it. The novel took the lives of eight women, all with intellects and ambitions, living within the patriarchy, doomed to domesticity. Today practicalities have changed - disposable nappies, microwaves, takeaways - but little else. The emotional lives of women go on as ever: choosing the 'wrong" man, suffering the same rejections, trapped by love and circumstance. Choice" remains elusive. The first two books of Fay Weldon's Love and Inheritance trilogy - Habits of the House and Long Live the King - are published by Head of Zeus at £7.99 and £14.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) L-R: Elizabeth Taylor, author of 'Angel'; Edith Wharton, author of 'The Age of Innocence' AS Byatt on The Professor's House by Willa Cather (1925) I knew nothing about Willa Cather when Carmen Callil first asked me to write introductions to her novels, but I found I was discovering a truly great American woman novelist - one with a wonderful sense of form and a powerful use of language. Her novels are all splendid in different ways, but I have a particular fondness for The Professor's House. It is about Prof Godfrey St Peter, who does not want to move into the elegant new house his family has built. At the novel's centre is an account of Tom Outland's discovery of an ancient Indian village on a mountain in New Mexico, full of light and air. Cather said she wanted to do what the Dutch painters did - show a bright open space through a door or window in a domestic interior. She was a great artist, and the form works perfectly. AS Byatt's latest novel The Children's Book is published by Everyman's Library at £13.99 (books.telegraph.co.uk) Esther Freud on The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann (1936) Rosamond Lehmann's first novel, Dusty Answer, published when she was just 26, turned her into a celebrity of her time, dealing as it did with a sexually experimental heroine and a bohemian world. But it was The Weather in the Streets that astounded women, and men, with its searing depiction of what it's like to fall in love. It tells the story of Olivia, divorced and living in London, who meets an old admirer and begins an affair. Rollo is handsome, married, but never depicted as the villain. With brilliant dialogue and intense passages of elation and despair, The Weather takes you on the rollercoaster of their relationship. I read it about 10 years ago but it reminded me of the turmoil of my early twenties and how being in love can be a full-time job. Esther Freud's latest novel Lucky Break is published by Bloomsbury at £7.99 (book.telegraph.co.uk)