Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary British women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives.

Female readers are key to the future of fiction and--as parents, teachers, and librarians--the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends.

For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories.

Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre.

Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why--in Jackie Kay's words--'our lives are mapped by books.'

One of the most successful books ever published and the basis of one of the most popular and highly praised Hollywood films of all time, Gone with the Wind has entered world culture in a way that few other stories have.

Seventy-five years on from the cinematic release of Gone with the Wind, Helen Taylor looks at the reasons why the book and film have had such an appeal, especially for women.

Drawing on letters and questionnaires from female fans, she brings together material from southern history, literature, film and feminist theory and discusses the themes of the Civil War and issues of race.

She has previously written Gender, Race and Region in the writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin and The Daphne Du Maurier Companion.

For Europeans looking across the Atlantic, American culture is often the site of desire, fascination, and envy. In Britain, the rich culture of the American South has made a particularly strong impact. Helen Taylor explores the ways in which contemporary Southern culture has been enthusiastically produced and reproduced in a British context.

Taylor examines some of the South's most significant cultural exports in discussions that range across literature, music, film, television, theater, advertising, and tourism to focus on how and why Southern themes and icons have become so deeply embedded in British cultural life. The enduring legacy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind can be seen today in the popularity of sequels, revisions, and reworkings of the novel. The conversation between these cultures is further explored in British responses to Alex Haley's Roots, the British theater's special affection for Tennessee Williams's plays, and the marketing of New Orleans as a preferred destination for European tourists. The transformation of Southern culture--itself a hybrid of the European, African, and American--as it circulates back across the Atlantic suggests not only new views of the history, racial politics, music and art of both Britain and the American South, but also an enhanced understanding of the dynamic flow of culture itself.