In her poem Zelda Helen Dunmore writes, “Some visitors said she ought / to do more housework, get herself taught / to cook / Above all, find some silent occupation / rather than mess up Scott’s vocation”. Vivienne Eliot and Jane Bowles would have recognised the sentiment. In Heroines, Kate Zambreno extricates these muses of modernism from the asylum, and their one-dimensional role as wives of Great Authors, and breathes life into them as intellects and, though often blocked and suppressed, artists.

Kate Zambreno has a fresh way of approaching literary history. There isn’t a flaccid, dull page in Heroines. The language is in your face, conversational, idiosyncratic, but informed by years of research and reading. Part diary, part polemic against the treatment of depression, part defence of sentiment in the face of the school of New Criticism. It is also an incitement to fill all sorts of reading gaps. My wish list expanded considerably by the end of the book.

Go to the bookshop, or order online, or however you procure your reading material, but read this book. If you are in doubt you can read an excerpt. It might just be the best book I’ve read this year.

I am choked at coming to the end of Heroines, and for several days will be found reading Kate Zambreno’s blog archives.