This thesis consists of the creative work of The Handbag Tales, a short-story cycle of 10 interlinked tales based on the everyday objects found inside women’s handbags and the backstories of how they came to be kept or found within them.

The thesis and exegesis will explore themes of secrecy, identity, memory and loss in key periods of women’s lives, sometimes using handbags as a plot device or motif, treating the highly personalised contents carried within them as a narrative vehicle.

The exegesis, It’s in the Bag: stories of identity, memory and loss and the short-story cycle, discusses the creative work The Handbag Tales and the work’s genre, the short-story cycle. It also looks at the evolution of the woman’s handbag as more than a purely practical object, as a symbol of various perceptions of femininity, as a signifier of social and economic class and as an emotional talisman because of what – specifically and sometimes randomly – it carries.