Some novelists struggle to make their characters’ names authentically ordinary – that chancy mixture of class signifier, current fashion and parental whim – and others don’t bother. Zoë Heller fell clearly into the latter category with her exemplary – and indeed trend-defining – tale of jealousy, transgression and revenge, Notes on a Scandal. Who other should Sheba Hart (legendarily beautiful queen meets the site of emotion and romance) be assailed by than Barbara Covett (vaguely old-fashioned, spinsterish forename meets envy and suppressed desire)? Sheba should have heard alarm bells ringing all around the staff room where the pair met.

Published nearly 15 years ago, Notes on a Scandal was one of the first of a wave of novels centred on vengeful women that reached its commercial height with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, in which husband and wife plot and counter-plot against one another, their increasingly unreliable narratives alternating. Though markedly different – Flynn starts with marital infidelity, while Heller’s main concern is thwarted friendship – both books probe the complex overlap of desire and rage that also fuels the success of television dramas such as The Replacement and Doctor Foster, in which Suranne Jones plays a GP unravelling in the aftermath of her husband’s affair, about to return for a second series.

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Naturally, there is nothing new under the sun, as a slew of novelists inspired by ancient myth and literature – Colm Tóibín, Salman Rushdie, Kamila Shamsie and Orhan Pamuk – currently demonstrate. More recently than Sophocles, one might look to Muriel Spark, and the glorious stories of rococo revenge elaborated in Memento Mori and A Far Cry from Kensington; and to Angela Carter’s gothic tales and Iris Murdoch’s heady psychodramas. So embedded in the culture is Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil that 35 years after publication Weldon was able to take up the reins and provide a sequel only a few months ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cate Blanchett, left, as Sheba Hart and Dame Judi Dench as Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal. Photograph: Giles Keyte/AP

Weldon’s Ruth Patchett is an exceptional and terrifying creation: abandoned by her faithless husband, she sets about remaking herself, mentally and physically, in order to emerge as Bobbo and his lover’s worst nightmare. And significantly, it is Mary Fisher – delicate, beautiful and a bestselling author of romantic novels – who is the real target of Ruth’s rage.

Frequently, in novels by female writers, the battles between women dominate. By contrast, think of two short stories by Roald Dahl. In “The Way Up to Heaven”, an anxiously punctual woman made miserable by her husband’s attempts to make her late takes her revenge by leaving him stuck in a broken lift; in “Lamb to the Slaughter”, a spurned wife bashes her husband’s head in with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the murder weapon to the investigating policeman. In these neat and ingenious tales of comeuppance, the object of vengeance is clear and present.

Fay Weldon’s Ruth Patchett is an exceptional and terrifying creation: abandoned by her faithless husband, she sets about remaking herself as his worst nightmare

Elsewhere, though, men appear as merely a way to get to more subliminal and powerful feelings of rejected and marginalised desires. Is anybody really interested in Maxim de Winter, the husband at the centre of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca? The story’s tension derives almost entirely from the hostility that radiates from Manderley’s sinister and manipulative housekeeper, Mrs Danvers – known only by that name – and her attempts to keep alive the spirit of De Winter’s first wife. That she herself disappears at the end of the novel underlines her symbolic and provisional nature; she exists as a cipher of desire and revenge, an agent who will destroy all and leave no trace of herself.

Such territory has proved fertile for a wide range of female novelists. They might conjure an apparently affluent, cosy world, as Harriet Lane does in Her, in which a sophisticated and successful woman befriends a harassed mother in order to exorcise past misdeeds of which her victim is barely aware, let alone culpable. Often, the home itself is breached, as in Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, both of which send their families to holiday houses and then introduce uninvited guests of uncertain backstory, so that there is a double displacement. Intrusion by an unknown quantity is key, so that we enter a permanently ambiguous mode in which friendship, enmity and collusion are inextricably tangled.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs de Winter with Judith Anderson as Mrs Danvers in Rebecca. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/United Artists

Notable are the themes of self-determination and self-possession that play out across these novels, and the way in which they excavate buried trauma and memories. And what better arena than the domestic space? In Kate Murray-Browne’s excellent debut novel, The Upstairs Room, a contemporary London house – complete with all its issues of class and wealth inequality – is itself a conduit for revenge, literally sickening its inhabitants until they take notice of it. The central figure of Rachel Cusk’s last two novels, Outline and Transit, finds herself in a flat that appears to mirror and even mock the fragility of her situation; we finally see her at a posh countryside dinner that resembles nothing more strongly than a scene from Aeschylus. In other words, don’t diss the domestic: its cushion covers yield enough material for a thousand novels.