A SCIENCE fiction novel in which a totalitarian state forces females to have loveless sex with men and forbids them to own property or have jobs, has emerged as one of the books that women find most life- changing.

The Handmaid’s Tale, a 1986 satire by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood, is one of the top 10 novels that transformed women’s lives according to a poll by Woman’s Hour listeners on Radio 4.

It is a list that — not surprisingly, given that 93% of the 14,000 voters were women — shows the war between the sexes is going strong.

Among the other chosen books is The Women’s Room, the 1977 novel by Marilyn French, the strident American feminist. It includes the notorious line: “all men are rapists, that’s all they are . . . they rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes”.

With some noble exceptions the men presented in the novels are a motley crew. Several books on the list feature male rapists and many shallow and pompous men attempting to crush the spirits of strong but downtrodden women.

Another of the books is The Color Purple by Alice Walker, the story of a young black girl’s horrific treatment by her husband. According to Professor Lisa Jardine, the leading literary critic who helped to run the poll: “The Color Purple is a more scary book than The Women’s Room, because it really does say all men are s****.”

It is not, however, all so stark. The Women’s Watershed Fiction poll asked women to pick a life-changing book that “has spoken to you on a personal level — it may have changed the way you look at yourself or simply made you happy to be a woman”.

Only one of the top 10 is written by a man — Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s tragic tale of Tess, a country peddler’s daughter, who gives birth to a son called Sorrow, who dies shortly after.

It was one of five 19th-century classics on the list, alongside Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Little Women by the American author Louisa May Alcott.

Completing the list is Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier’s tale written in 1938 of a young woman who is persecuted by her husband’s housekeeper, the villainous Mrs Danvers.

Jardine believes the type of books chosen give an interesting insight into the minds of modern women. “We should worry that an awful lot of women still feel the struggle between the domestic and self-realisation is a live issue,” she said.

“These books are the ones large numbers of women recognised themselves in.”

She held up Jane Eyre as a plain girl who gets her man and settles for second-best. “Women said it was such a relief to have a plain heroine,” she added.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Sarah Brown says 'no thanks' to veal at G8 - twice
• Stockton-on-Tees is obesity capital of Britain
• Stores blame poor sales on Murray factor