I raced through the first four volumes of Maya Angelou's autobiography (along with this one, "Gather Together in my Name", "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas" and "Heart of a Woman"), a volume a day. Angelou's prose style is perfect, but these books are really worth reading because of her honesty and warmth.

Her portrait of her young life in Stamps, Arkansas, is painted with all the immediacy and urgency of childhood, but as an adult revisiting the memory, she sensitively interprets the needs, worries and joys of those around her, giving us a vivid insight into Black life in segregated southern America, as much as into the heart of a little girl separated by miles and years from her parents.

In later volumes, as Angelou raises a son, travels about America and abroad and takes on jobs from creole cook to political activist, she shows us a naive but resolute young woman taking life's challenges with her head held high, and slowly growing into the footsteps of her brave and dauntless mother and grandmother. Writing long enough after the event, she can represent her successes and her mishaps with equal honesty, without the need to wring adulation or forgiveness from her reader.

Reading Maya Angelou really makes the case for women's studies, or Black studies, or any other study of the writing of marginality. Not because such people are any different - Angelou's autobiography made me see how very much the same we all are, even across countries, traditions and generations. But because Angelou, moving from one country where she is most defined and restricted by being Black, moves to another where she is most defind and restricted by being a woman, and responds to, adapts to and rebels against both variously. Her writing demonstrates human resistance to the unnecessary distortions of social categorisation, and the flowering of love, dignity and creativity in the toughest of circumstances.