My earliest reading memory
I remember very clearly being taught to read by my father, who had just returned from the second world war in Italy with the RAF. We were living in a council house in Pontefract, having been evacuated from Sheffield. I was three or four, and we used a primer called The Radiant Way which I loved. I later used the title for one of my novels.

My favourite book growing up
I loved the Alison Uttley stories and was shocked to find in later life that the creator of Little Grey Rabbit was not a good mother and did not like children. I also loved Mary Poppins by PL Travers. I didn’t like the film, which was saccharine, but I loved the much sharper book. Travers too was a very difficult person.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure when I was 16 and was overwhelmed by its dark questioning of sexuality and religion and by the death of Sue Bridehead’s children. I think it reinforced what I would now call a tragic sense of life. Mrs Webster, our kindly teacher of religious studies, tried to argue me out of this pessimism, but it stuck with me.

The writer who changed my mind
James Joyce by Richard Ellmann changed my mind about Joyce and about biography. I read it in a long summer in Venice, 30 years ago, and it convinced me that biography could be a great genre and that Joyce, whose work I’d found difficult, was a great writer.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I never really intended to be a writer. I just started writing. There was something in the works of Saul Bellow and Angus Wilson, which I read while still a student, that opened up the possibilities of writing about the contemporary world.

The book I reread
George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. I first came across it at school and have often gone back to it. I liked it because the heroine was called Maggie, like me, and because it evoked a rural landscape that I knew well. There was a flour mill on the River Witham near my aunt’s house which was one of our favourite outings.

The book I could never read again
Our family had a passion for Georgette Heyer, but I don’t think I could read her romantic novels now. Too passionate, too purple. But I did recently reread her Waterloo novel, An Infamous Army. It’s very good and I am told historically accurate.

The book I discovered later in life
There was a time when I was dismissive of the French nouveau roman, which I found unreadable, but then I discovered Georges Perec, a writer of eccentric and enjoyable genius, whose works struck me as wholly original. I used to think the notion of writing a novel without using the letter “e” ridiculous, but the book in question, La Disparition, is profoundly moving. Some of his minor obsessions – jigsaws, lists and labels – echo my own and I wish I had read him earlier.

The book I am currently reading
David Storey’s Saville. I recently read his compelling memoir, A Stinging Delight, and am now discovering many ancestral Yorkshire reverberations in this fine novel. I recognise the industrial landscapes, the mindset, the ambitions, the confusions. He was slightly older than me but I recognise the world he lived in, in boyhood and as an adult.

My comfort read
Anything by Lee Child. I love Jack Reacher.

• Margaret Drabble on the Romantics is published by Thames & Hudson. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.