“The woman artist is an ignored, little-understood force, delayed in its rise!” Hélène Bertaux, founder of Paris’s Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, declared in 1881 with reference to the emergence of women on the art-scene. Discover the highly talented women who rubbed shoulders with the exclusive Impressionist clique in Paris in the late 19th Century: Monet, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro, but were largely forgotten as pre-20th-century female artists so often are.

Contemporary discussion surrounding fair representation of women in film and the need to see an increase in the number of female directors, has come one century too late. However, it is fair to say we have seen a larger number of films produced in recent years, with strong female leads and casts. Here are some of our recommendations, some recent, some classics.

What has the Renaissance “commonplace” book got to do with intellectual female rebellion? Oxford English graduate, Marianne, explores the forgotten women of the Renaissance, avid scientists, rhetoricians, poets and orators, barred from formalised education, but who rebelled by engaging with the masculine commonplace book tradition.

Despite historic and contemporary underrepresentation in science, women have been at the forefront of ground-breaking discoveries in many scientific disciplines for centuries. Here we place the spotlight on some of these pioneering women, from Rosalind Franklin and her contributions to the discovery of DNA, to the indomitable crystallographer, Dorothy Hodgkin, and genetics experts, Barbara McClintock, and biochemist, Jennifer Doudna.

STEM at university - have things changed? Closing the gender gaps in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, is central to The Caroline Club ethos.

Participating in debate and public speaking competitions provides young girls with the critical thinking and research skills needed to succeed in top universities and workplaces, vastly increases their knowledge about the outside world, but most importantly endows them with the confidence and resilience needed to be successful women.

Hester Pulter was a female Renaissance poet, deeply interested in modern science, politics and literature, yet her identity as a woman kept her both geographically and intellectually isolated and her poetry was left undiscovered in a library until it was discovered accidentally in 1996. Hester gives a rare female voice to the poetic language of scientific discovery, we urge you to give her a read!

Oxford University PhD English researcher, Izzy, gives us an insight into the liberation of female roles in 19th century European literature, spotlighting three female characters who emerge from European literature in the later 19th Century; Anna Karenina in Russian, Madame Bovary in French and Effi Briest in German.

Nigerian female author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is a renowned public speaker as well as a novelist. Her main concerns as a writer are female and African American identity, and she repeatedly explores the extent of an individual’s autonomy in determining cultural identity. Check out her inspirational and resonant novels, 'Half of a Yellow Sun' and 'Americanah', as well as her various TED Talks, including 'The Danger of a Single Story' and 'We Should All Be Feminists'.

Read published author, Elisa’s engaging piece on why the deeply-philosophical, yet compelling writer, Iris Murdoch, deserves a new audience: “I discovered Iris Murdoch in my first year at Cambridge, where I was studying English at Pembroke College…this was 1999 and my best friend had just finished The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and passed it to me as I waved my goodbye before leaving.”

“While many authors make their name with a particular style – an emotional, first-person narrative or a detached, poetic musing on life – Smith’s strength lies in her ability to straddle different genres, hopping and jumping to inhabit different voices. Her two most recent works, Feel Free and Grand Union are very different. Feel Free is an essay collection, about topics from Justin Bieber to Brexit and climate change, while Grand Union is a collection of short stories. Yet, I would say they are my two favourite works by her.”

When one is an early learner of French, and trying to graduate from textbooks to real books, there are suggestions that appear again and again. Le Petit Prince is charming and readable, Tintin has an endless back catalogue, and L’Etranger by Albert Camus is every single teacher’s go-to. However, if you want to veer carefully off the beaten track, the Belgian author, Amélie Nothomb, is an excellent choice (you can also read her in translation).

Discover one of Latin America’s most popular authors, Isabelle Allende, in Lila’s blog on the genre of magical realism, ‘Writing as an act of hope’ and a form of female resistance in The House of Spirits.

A spotlight on Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian author who writes in English. Amy first discovered her work when completing her french dissertation on Haitian literature, and found her novels a fascinating insight into a history that was previously unknown - the parsley massacre, the continued rivalry between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This post spotlights a different country as well as an inspiring female author worth a voice.