Recorded at this week's Hay Festival 2018, Francesca Rhydderch introduces us to her favourite female character in literature - Virginia Woolf's, arguably, most playful and ground-breaking character Orlando from her novel 'Orlando: A Biography' - and extracts the lessons we could all learn from her.

Francesca is an Associate Professor at Swansea University, with her area of expertise in creative writing. Her debut novel, 'The Rice Paper Diaries', won the Wales Book of the Year Fiction Prize 2014 and her novel 'The Taxidermist's Daughter' was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in the same year.

In this series of The Essay, five female writers offer a personal guide to favourite and well-known female fictional characters - extracting the lessons we could all learn from them.

The writers in this series include broadcaster Afua Hirsch, historian Bettany Hughes and poets Fiona Sampson and Mab Jones.

With Lunchtime Concert, In Tune, Free Thinking, The Verb and The Listening Service all broadcasting from the festival, The Essay is part of Hay Week at BBC Radio 3.