Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had grouped in provocative sections: "Brave, Bold and Wilful"; "Good Girls and Where it Gets Them". She talked about the difference between the work undertaken by "chaps" – the novel and the epic – and the kind of stories often referred to as "old wives’ tales". She suggested it was time for the power of female heroines to be not just reclaimed but Read more ...

Although the collaboration between Jane Arden and Jack Bond was truly two-way, their films were wholly driven by a female perspective. They also evolved from Arden’s explorations into the nature of self and how external forces affect that. Yet instead of being a form of therapy, the Arden-Bond films are magical journeys blurring the boundary between the real and unreal.Separation (1967) has some mod-ish trappings: music by Procul Harum, visuals from light-show artist Mark Boyle and clothing from Ossie Clark. The character Jane (Arden herself) drifts through a world where she interacts with a Read more ...

GAGGLE (n.): According to the Oxford Dictionary the collective noun for a flock of geese - or, less formally, a disorderly group of people - actually finds its root in the noise that a goose makes. It’s a fact that raises a smile as one attempts to create a back story for Deborah Coughlin’s 21-member all-female choir, as they stare out from the mysterious, brightly-coloured promotional shots with black eyes and tightly-set, blue-painted lips.The bird references carry over to From the Mouth of the Cave; whether in the form of titles, sound effects or a perfectly-choreographed cacophony Read more ...

It’s hard to think of any other records as exuberantly hedonistic as the handful of singles this London band rattled off at the beginning of the 1980s. Yes, they were accompanied by the then necessary punk sneer which said, This is all strictly ironic. But the music couldn’t lie. The music really did want you to go wild in the country, even if naughty Annabella Lwin just wanted to sneak off for a fag. Or was naughty Annabella just an illusion too? The 40something Lwin who skipped and twirled onto the Islington Academy stage last night certainly had as much energy as the 14- to 18-year-old Read more ...

If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...

Those of a certain age have certain memories (very certain) of Farrah Fawcett-Majors, wife of the Bionic Man and not exactly unbionic herself, especially in that poster of her in the red one-piece with Seventies enormohair and fluorescent American Dream gnashers. There were a couple of others in Charlie’s Angels. One forgets their names, and indeed faces. (Feel free, scholars of the era, to write in on this.) It was revolutionary at the time: girls had been high-heeling men in the schnoz since The Avengers, but only one lady at a time. Now three bra-burners, Aaron Spelling’s fantasy answer to Read more ...

Like a fist to the face of the traditionally insipid, female-fronted rom-com, Bridesmaids marks a departure from the oft-derided norm, not by being brassy or crude (OK, there might be a sizeable helping of the latter) but because of its authentic humour, credible character dynamics and the foregrounding of female friendships over romance. It is also wildly funny.Kristen Wiig (who co-wrote the film with Annie Mumolo, who appears as “Nervous Woman on Plane”) is Annie, a thirtysomething singleton asked by her childhood chum Lillian (Maya Rudolph) to be her maid of honour. Despite her outstanding Read more ...

The sturdy, healthy, almost glowing attractiveness of Ruby Loftus, her reddish curls partly tamed by a green hair net, her face punctuated by bright-red lipstick characteristic of the 1940s, her blue overall neatly complementing her red shirt, and her expression intense and concentrated as she screws a breech ring as part of the manufacture of the Bofors gun at a factory in Newport, is a famously captivating image of the Home Front in the last world war.Dame Laura Knight’s painting Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1943 (main picture), a portrait of the young woman choreographed among her Read more ...

The remarkable thing about Caryl Churchill, Max Stafford-Clark has said, is that she is "completely new, every time she comes out of the box". Watching the first act to his revival of her most celebrated work, which Stafford-Clark revisits for Chichester Festival 29 years after he directed its Royal Court premiere, you feel Top Girls isn’t so much being lifted fresh from that box as bursting through the lid.A surreal yet psychologically spot-on set-up for the scenes of Eighties professional and domestic life to come, its extraordinary opening scene conflates centuries, continents, life Read more ...

Freud’s West Hampstead house is tied up in a cat’s cradle of thick rope. The rope is the same colour as the brick, a deep orange but with a sheeny lustre. It makes the house look not quite real, a Brobdingnagian doll’s house transplanted to this unsuspecting corner of leafy west-London suburbia. It’s an uncanny impression heightened by the pristine condition of its squat, many-windowed façade.Housebound is the name of this punningly titled "intervention" by Alice Anderson, a 35-year-old French-English artist who now lives in London; and the proffered themes of constraint, imprisonment and Read more ...

Kelly Reichardt’s quietly radical vision of the Wild West is a slender, provocatively ambiguous work and the antithesis to the genre’s muscular action-packed epics. It’s a western which aligns us with those who don bonnets rather than Stetsons, and which favours quiet pluck over showy heroics. With a narrative shorn almost entirely of incident, its existential, quasi-religious minimalism recalls Waiting for Godot.Set during the earliest days of the Oregon Trail in 1845 and based on real events, Meek’s Cutoff is the story of three families who, in their pursuit of a better life, hire a guide, Read more ...

Feminism is a dirty word. Ask anybody. Do they want to be tarred with the label? Do they, hell. The word still carries connotations of man-haters. Even today’s young women fighting against harassment in tube carriages, horrified by the easy access and the violence of pornography, even they complain that fessing up to being “feminist” lays them open to ostracisation and isolation. Yet with rates of violence against women, unequal pay, the lack of women on boards, pregnancy as a cause of job dismissal, sex trafficking - rightly or wrongly, feminism is on the march again.I know, I’ve seen Read more ...