Pride and Prejudice’ on top

The classics are still key, according to BBC radio listeners.

Despite the plethora of new novels on the bookshelves, they have voted Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's sometimes acerbic commentary on the lives of 19th-century women, the No 1 "watershed book" that changed the way they think about life.

No 2 in the Women's Watershed Fiction poll for the Women's Hour programme on Radio 4 was Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a semi-autobiographical tale of racial prejudice in the American south.

This was followed by Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Marilyn French's The Women's Room and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Radio 4 said.

Some 14,000 listeners took part in the poll, 93 per cent of them women.

They asked listeners to cite a book that "has spoken to you on a personal level; it may have changed the way you look at yourself, or simply made you happy to be a woman."

Writer Monica Ali cited Elizabeth Bennet, heroine of Pride and Prejudice, as one of the strong points of the book.

"If ever we have wished to identify with a fictional character, surely it is Lizzy," she said.