# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 14, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-18-greatest-women-writers-of-all-time*

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## Current results (0 votes)

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.

Tags: books, authors, writers, poetry