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From eccentric spinster aunts to Alice in Wonderland, the novelist traces the steps of fiction's most engaging female adventurers
Jennie Rooney's new novel The Opposite of Falling, in which Ursula Bridgewater takes Thomas Cook's famous new tour of America after her engagement is broken off, is out now. Her first novel, Inside the Whale, was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award in 2008.
1. Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
This is a common friend, an aunt is one of the most important figure in the running genre fiction. In this wonderful novel by Graham Greene phase space Aunt center, allowing it to drag Henry's exit from the suburbs and on the Orient Express to Paris, Istanbul and South America, and show him the way, just how much fun you can have her aunt.
2. Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The ultimate female traveller, Alice wanders away from a picnic, falls down a rabbit hole, and is whisked away to a fantasy land where things just get curiouser and curiouser. There is a white rabbit who is always late, a smile without a cat, the Mad Hatter and his tea party, and an endless array of creatures and tales.
3. Miss Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View by EM Forster
Armed with her Baedeker guidebook, Lucy travels to Italy with her cousin and chaperone, the rather snippy Miss Bartlett. Upon arriving at the Pensione Bertolini, they swap rooms with a father and son whose rooms both have views ("Am I to conclude," asks Miss Bartlett upon receiving the offer, "that he is a socialist?"). Lucy's experiences in Italy open her up to the possibility of love â€" even if it is with a socialist.
April. Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Shcherbaty and chatty, the wife of Bath travel to Canterbury with Chaucer 's mob of pilgrims. It is not limited in its discussion of her five marriages, and especially happy to describe her sexual activity and the ways in which she liked to use it with her various husbands.
5. Hortense in Small Island by Andrea Levy
Hortense knows everything there is to know about England: she has read Shakespeare, uses words such as "perchance", and makes perfect fairy cakes. But when she finally travels there in 1948, she finds that England does not know so very much about her. A fabulous, richly comic voice, exploring the realities of postwar immigration. 6. Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Fearing that marriage will stifle her independence, young American Isabel Archer takes up the offer of a trip to Europe with (of course) her aunt. While in Europe she inherits a fortune, bequeathed to her for the purpose of securing her freedom, but which causes her to become the object of scheming bounty-hunters. Dark and goose-bumpingly sinister. 7. The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Inspired by Arthurian legend, Tennyson's poem recounts the curse of the Lady of Shalott, forced forever to weave a magic web without looking directly out at the world. However, upon glimpsing Lancelot in her mirror, she turns to the window, bringing the curse upon her, so that she dies on her subsequent boat journey to Camelot (cue Lancelot, with one of literature's oddest consolations: "she had a lovely face"). 8. Clarissa Dalloway in "Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
An interior journey, this one. Told through a stream-of-consciousness narrative, it is the story of Mrs Dalloway's preparations for a party that evening, and takes place over a single day in June. The action is mainly restricted to flashbacks, but by the end of the book, it is clear that this day has been a journey through Clarissa's mind. 9. Orleanna Price and her daughters in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Married to a Baptist missionary, Orleanna Price accompanies her husband from America to the Belgian Congo with their four daughters. The novel is narrated by the girls and their mother, each witnessing and responding to their father's actions in different ways. A deeply woven study of misogyny, misplaced religion and the blight of colonial occupation. 10. Wendy Darling in Peter and Wendy by JM Barrie
After sewing Peter Pan's shadow back on in the Kensington nursery, Wendy is recruited by Peter to be his "mother" and he asks her to come back to Neverland with him. She flies out of the window with her brothers, following Peter's somewhat unhelpful travel directions: "Second to the right and then straight on 'til morning!" • Jennie Wayne Rooney 'new novel, by contrast hit , in which Ursula Bridgewater decides to take Thomas Cook's famous tour of America after she is dumped by her fiance, is out now. Rooney's first novel, Inside the Whale, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel award in 2008.
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