I arrived at university in the autumn of 1981 to a college that had only recently admitted women – the concession was to put full-length mirrors on some of the staircases – and an English course that had remained set in its ways for some few hundred years, give or take.
I had a fledgling knowledge of feminism and was starting to think about politics and the higgledy-piggledy world beyond the classroom, but my non-academic reading was more Agatha Christie than Kate Millett. Then a new tutor arrived, Dr Jeri Johnson, an American and James Joyce specialist. Looking back, I realise she was barely older than us, but at the time she seemed very grown up. Jeri transformed my experience of university. It wasn't just a matter of introducing new authors – Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich – but rather that she encouraged us to think differently, to understand the interconnectedness of things, to find the story behind the story. Placing books and their authors in a context, seeing the influences of a person's life that might or might not impact on their work, was not how I'd been brought up. She taught that sometimes, as students or artists, we would need to stand our ground. And that speaking up, whether as the sole female student in a lecture hall, or at work, mattered.
On Wednesday evening, I stood in the Royal Festival Hall in London looking out over the hundreds of people gathered to toast 15 years of the Orange prize for fiction. The prize honours literature of excellence, originality and imagination, it connects great writers with enthusiastic readers. But also it creates a space in which women can be artists and their voices can be heard, the lesson I learned 30 years ago in a classroom in Oxford. And in the crowd, standing next to my son and daughter, was Jeri, inspiring the next generation of readers and writers.