By Marina Warner
Read by Emma Fielding

Fifty years since the first publication of Betty Friedan's seminal feminist work The Feminine Mystique, Radio 4 has commissioned three leading writers to celebrate her influence in new short stories exploring the contemporary feminist landscape.

Emma Fielding reads the first story in this series, by award winning writer and mythographer Marina Warner. Just as some of Angela Carter's short stories from The Bloody Chamber were first published in high fashion magazine Vogue, and Carter's retelling of fable and myth turned on the original meaning of 'glamour' as a spell, Marina Warner explores feminine mystique through a housewife in the 1950s who weaves hope and freedom into her longing for a mink coat.

Marina Warner has written novels, short stories and non-fiction centering around women and the imagery and iconography they conjure for more than thirty years.

The other writers in the series are British-Sierra Leonean novelist Aminatta Forna, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and judge of the Man Booker International Prize, with a surreal and wryly humourous contemporary story read by Doon MacKichan, and Sarah Hall, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists 2013, who brings us a story set in a dystopian near future, read by Francesca Dymond.

Producer: Allegra McIlroy. Show less