Top 10 Greatest Books by Female Authors

Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Mary Ann Evans's panoramic novel of provincial English life examines two parallel stories of idealistic marriage failure — Dorothea Brooke's with Casaubon and Lydgate's with Rosamond — with a compassion, intelligence, and complexity that makes it, by wide critical consensus, the greatest novel in the English language.

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novel — based on the true story of escaped slave Margaret Garner who killed her infant daughter rather than see her returned to slavery — is the most important American novel of the 20th century's second half. Its exploration of slavery's psychological devastation, its extraordinary prose, and its use of magical realism to externalise trauma make it a work of world literature by any standard.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse reinvented the novel through stream-of-consciousness narration, interior monologue, and the abolition of plot as conventional readers understood it. Centred on two visits to the Ramsay family's Scottish holiday home separated by the trauma of the First World War, it is simultaneously a technical revolution in fiction and an extraordinarily tender portrait of family love, time, and the impossibility of knowing another person.

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre — the first-person narrative of an orphaned governess who refuses to accept social diminishment while also refusing to compromise her moral principles — is the novel that invented the modern literary heroine. "Reader, I married him" remains the most famous sentence in romantic fiction, but it is Jane's insistence on her own dignity, desire, and autonomy throughout the novel that makes her one of fiction's most powerful protagonists.

Maya Angelou's debut memoir — covering her childhood in the segregated South, her experience of rape at age 8, her subsequent years of silence, and her gradual recovery through literature — is one of the most powerful works of autobiographical writing in American literature and a foundational text of African-American literary tradition. Its frank treatment of childhood trauma has made it among the most challenged books in American schools.

Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel — about a talented young woman's mental breakdown during a New York magazine internship in the 1950s — is the definitive literary account of depression and the constraints placed on women's ambitions in the mid-20th century. Published under a pseudonym one month before Plath's suicide, it became one of the most read and discussed American novels in the feminist literary canon.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18 years old, producing simultaneously the first science fiction novel, the first literary exploration of artificial life, and one of literature's greatest examinations of the moral responsibilities of creation. Victor Frankenstein's abandonment of his creation — not the monster's violence but Frankenstein's failure of parental duty — is the novel's central ethical argument, as relevant to AI development in 2026 as it was to galvanism in 1818.

Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece — following Janie Crawford through three marriages and her journey toward self-realisation in the Black communities of Florida — was dismissed on publication and largely forgotten until Alice Walker's 1975 essay rediscovered it. Now considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the greatest American novels ever written, its use of African-American vernacular dialect was revolutionary.

Min Jin Lee's epic novel following four generations of a Korean family in Japan from 1910 to 1989 is the most ambitious work of historical fiction about the Korean-Japanese experience. Beginning with a teenage girl's pregnancy and following the consequences through nearly a century, it demonstrates how gender, ethnicity, and class compound to restrict individual lives while also showing the extraordinary resilience individuals exercise within those constraints.

Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Mary Ann Evans's panoramic novel of provincial English life examines two parallel stories of idealistic marriage failure — Dorothea Brooke's with Casaubon and Lydgate's with Rosamond — with a compassion, intelligence, and complexity that makes it, by wide critical consensus, the greatest novel in the English language.

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novel — based on the true story of escaped slave Margaret Garner who killed her infant daughter rather than see her returned to slavery — is the most important American novel of the 20th century's second half. Its exploration of slavery's psychological devastation, its extraordinary prose, and its use of magical realism to externalise trauma make it a work of world literature by any standard.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse reinvented the novel through stream-of-consciousness narration, interior monologue, and the abolition of plot as conventional readers understood it. Centred on two visits to the Ramsay family's Scottish holiday home separated by the trauma of the First World War, it is simultaneously a technical revolution in fiction and an extraordinarily tender portrait of family love, time, and the impossibility of knowing another person.

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre — the first-person narrative of an orphaned governess who refuses to accept social diminishment while also refusing to compromise her moral principles — is the novel that invented the modern literary heroine. "Reader, I married him" remains the most famous sentence in romantic fiction, but it is Jane's insistence on her own dignity, desire, and autonomy throughout the novel that makes her one of fiction's most powerful protagonists.

Maya Angelou's debut memoir — covering her childhood in the segregated South, her experience of rape at age 8, her subsequent years of silence, and her gradual recovery through literature — is one of the most powerful works of autobiographical writing in American literature and a foundational text of African-American literary tradition. Its frank treatment of childhood trauma has made it among the most challenged books in American schools.

Sylvia Plath's semi-autobiographical novel — about a talented young woman's mental breakdown during a New York magazine internship in the 1950s — is the definitive literary account of depression and the constraints placed on women's ambitions in the mid-20th century. Published under a pseudonym one month before Plath's suicide, it became one of the most read and discussed American novels in the feminist literary canon.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 18 years old, producing simultaneously the first science fiction novel, the first literary exploration of artificial life, and one of literature's greatest examinations of the moral responsibilities of creation. Victor Frankenstein's abandonment of his creation — not the monster's violence but Frankenstein's failure of parental duty — is the novel's central ethical argument, as relevant to AI development in 2026 as it was to galvanism in 1818.

Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece — following Janie Crawford through three marriages and her journey toward self-realisation in the Black communities of Florida — was dismissed on publication and largely forgotten until Alice Walker's 1975 essay rediscovered it. Now considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the greatest American novels ever written, its use of African-American vernacular dialect was revolutionary.

Min Jin Lee's epic novel following four generations of a Korean family in Japan from 1910 to 1989 is the most ambitious work of historical fiction about the Korean-Japanese experience. Beginning with a teenage girl's pregnancy and following the consequences through nearly a century, it demonstrates how gender, ethnicity, and class compound to restrict individual lives while also showing the extraordinary resilience individuals exercise within those constraints.