The 18 Greatest Women Writers of All Time

A Heian courtier, a Greek poet in fragments, Nobel laureates and the best-selling novelist alive or dead. Every era gets a candidate.

1

Agatha Christie

The best-selling novelist in any language, and the writer who set the rules of the whodunit.

2

Jane Austen

The Regency novelist whose six books remain the most adapted in English literature.

3

Toni Morrison

The Nobel and Pulitzer winner behind Beloved and Song of Solomon.

4

Virginia Woolf

The modernist who reshaped the English sentence and argued for a room of one's own.

5

Emily Dickinson

The Amherst poet who published almost nothing in her lifetime and changed American poetry after it.

6

Mary Shelley

The author of Frankenstein, which effectively invented science fiction.

7

Charlotte Brontë

The author of Jane Eyre, a first-person heroine unlike anything before her.

8

Simone de Beauvoir

The French philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex founded modern feminist theory.

9

Maya Angelou

The memoirist and poet of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

10

Ursula K. Le Guin

The author of The Left Hand of Darkness and Earthsea, who made genre fiction literary.

11

Margaret Atwood

The Canadian novelist of The Handmaid's Tale and twice a Booker winner.

12

Harper Lee

The author of To Kill a Mockingbird, a Pulitzer winner who published almost nothing else.

13

George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans, whose Middlemarch is regularly called the best English novel.

14

Murasaki Shikibu

The Heian court writer whose Tale of Genji, around 1010, is often called the first novel.

15

Sylvia Plath

The poet of Ariel and novelist of The Bell Jar, awarded a posthumous Pulitzer.

16

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Nigerian novelist of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.

17

Doris Lessing

The Nobel laureate behind The Golden Notebook.

18

Sappho

The archaic Greek poet of Lesbos, read in fragments for 2,600 years.