Bookshelfie with Isobel Maddison

We spoke with Isobel Maddison, fellow emerita of Lucy Cavendish College and former Fiction Prize judge, to discover what's on her bookshelf

The temptation to tidy the bookcase in my study before taking these photographs was almost overwhelming, but I've managed to resist. It looks fairly haphazard, but this case houses titles from my working library which are, fortunately, also some of my favourite books.

In pride of place are two first editions, one of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas which was a surprise gift from my family for a significant birthday. There may have been a few tears when I opened it. I love this pacifist, anti-fascist text, always topical, and especially illuminating when read in conjunction with Woolf's most experimental novel, The Waves (no first edition of this one, sadly).

Hemingway's A Moveable Feast sits beside Woolf as another prized first edition. It's always interesting to peek into the lives of modernist authors when they lived in Paris in the early 20th century. There are guest appearances from most of the 'big names' as they circled around the, now iconic, Shakespeare and Company bookshop, & the cafes on the Left Bank. The most fascinating parts are about the various attitudes to each other's writing, but it's also clear they were ordinary, as well as extraordinary, people, often struggling to write, think and simply live.

The novels of Elizabeth von Arnim are in abundance on these shelves, obviously, after spending many years reading and writing about this bestselling author. A favourite novel of hers is the wonderful Vera, and I recommend it. But there's also Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Angela Carter, Christa Wolf, Radclyffe Hall, Salman Rushdie, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, Flaubert, Audre Lorde, Vita Sackville West, Kafka, Saki, Pushkin, Evelyn Waugh, bell hooks and quite a lot of much-loved Katherine Mansfield (Elizabeth von Arnim's younger cousin).

I read contemporary fiction too (including all the brilliant, published authors from the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize), but I suppose this bookcase represents the foundation of my love of reading. It has also given me the excuse to talk endlessly about favourite books for many years with lively and enquiring students. These books may be familiar, but we never stop learning.

You might spot a pale blue book, laid horizontally, on top of Annabel Banks's fabulous short stories, Exercises in Control. The pretty gold lettering is Christmas Pudding by Nancy Mitford. This novel escapes the bookcase every Christmas to land on the coffee table where it sits every year, half read. It's a good book: funny, and comfortingly familiar. I don't fully understand why it has yet to be finished. Maybe it's like an old friend who can visit for as long as they wish? Or perhaps it will finally be read in full this year, only to be reread in the future. That's the joy of reading and the pleasure of these bookshelves: essentially, it's impossible to tire of the ideas, perspectives and approaches that emerge differently, fresh, every time a book is opened, and we choose to spend time reading.