In honor of Women’s History Month, we are featuring novels written by women and a little bit about the history of women and writing.
The first known written works by a woman, Enheduanna, appeared 4,200 years ago.
She was a Sumerian who lived in Ur. She is also the first author whose name was ever recorded.
After her time, creative writing became primarily a male occupation. Sappho is the only woman listed among the writers of Ancient Greece. During the Sangam period in Sri Lanka (300BCE to 300 AD) 27 of the 473 recognized scholars and poets from the Sangam academies were women.
During the 11th century, the Japanese author, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote what is probably the world’s first novel, Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji).
In 1148, Anna Komnene wrote the Alexiad, a history of her father, a Byzantine emperor.
In Britain, a woman who identified herself as Marie from France wrote and published narrative poems, stories about saint’s lives, and fables. She died in 1215 before Geoffrey Chaucer was born.
Despite the literary successes of women in the Middle Ages, writing was considered an immodest profession for women. Many women were forced to publish using pseudonyms.
In the 1600s Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn chose to ignore convention and publish under their own names. Cavendish wrote poetry and in 1666, she wrote The Descriptions of a New World, Called the Blazing Sun which many literary historians consider to be the first science fiction written in English. Behn was an actress, libertine, and spy. She wrote plays, poetry, prose and translated stories into English.
In the 18th century, novels became popular, but women authors typically published anonymously or used pseudonyms. Even in the 19th century, the Brontë sisters and George Elliot continued to use male pseudonyms.
After the Victorian era, being a woman novelist became more acceptable.
During the 1920s and 1930s during the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” four women became known as The Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh.
During the 1950s, men were the primary authors of romance novels, but women took over in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, women have dominated the romance genre.
In 1970, 38% of books on the New York Times Bestseller List were written by women. That number dropped to 14% in 1975. In 2001, for the first time bestselling novels were evenly divided between men authors and women authors.
Women have made great strides in genre fiction and literary fiction; however, men still win most major literary prizes. It may be because novels by women are still less likely to be reviewed than novels written by men.
Check out these famous novels by women. Enjoy!
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlottes Perkins Gilman
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Whose Body? By Dorothy L. Sayers
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Thornbirds by Colleen McCollough
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Herat is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
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