Part of me wants to rubbish her confused amalgam of sexual politics, art criticism and sociology. Indeed, reading her latest diatribe, Vamps and Tramps (Penguin, #163;8.99), is rather like spending the evening zapping through too many TV channels.

And yet there is something refreshing about her fearless approach to such hot issues as rape, abortion, political correctness. There is too much here on “culture wars” and on the “extraordinary” Paglia herself, but when she writes that she wants a “revamped feminism”, by which she means a women’s movement that focuses not on date-rape and sexual harassment but on freedom, choice and a confident (perhaps I should say aggressive) assertion of female superiority, you have to admire the sure outlines of her vision.

When Emilie Carles fell in love and decided she wanted to marry, aged 28,she had to beg permission from her father. It was 1928, and she was living in a remote farming village in the French Alps, where a woman’s lot was first to obey her father, then to marry wisely, only to live then under the rule of her husband. But Carles’s husband was different: a self-educated freethinker, he was happy to see his wife share with him as an equal. An excerpt from her memoir, Une soupe aux herbes, is included in The Penguin Book of Women’s Lives, edited by Phyllis Rose (#163;15). Here also we have selections from the work of such stalwarts as Simone de Beauvoir, Isak Dinesen, Colette, Maya Angelou, as well as the testimony of remarkable women like Nien Cheng, wife of a wealthy businessman, who survived torture and imprisonment by the Red Guards in Shanghai.

It was after seeing the film Brief Encounter (made in 1945), in which the heroine Laura Jesson meets her future lover while on her weekly visit into town to do some shopping and change her library book, that Nicola Beauman set out to discover just what that “library book” would have been. In A Very Great Profession: The Women’s Novel 1914-39 (Virago #163;8.99), Beauman affectionately resurrects a whole host of forgotten names - Cicely Hamilton, Ethel Mannin, Elinor Mordaunt - reminding us that “women’s literature” did not begin with the feminist movement.

Most of these novels celebrated the domestic life, the humdrum world of women pre-Pill, pre-The Female Eunuch, pre-Paglia. Joan Wyndham’s intimate and hilarious diaries of the war years, first published in the 1980s and now collected in one volume as Love Lessons amp; Love Is Blue (Mandarin #163;6.99), reveal that women could have fun, too. A naive Catholic girl in 1939, Wyndham soon “grew up” when she joined the WAAF; if she is to be believed, women were anything but repressed in those years.

Richard Holmes wrote his lyrical biography of Shelley in the ebullient 1960s when the Romantic poet’s “explosive mixture of fantasy, poetry and radical ideas” was closely reflected in the hopes and aspirations of the time. Despite this, Shelley: The Pursuit (now reissued by Flamingo #163;9.99) remains unsurpassed because of the extraordinarily vivid way in which Holmes builds up his portrait of this elusive character, from the way the eight-year-old Shelley used to scare his sisters with tales of supernatural spirits and monsters to that self-willed and tragic accident in the Gulf of Spezia.