Hi there!
Recently I’ve been wanting to create a kind of “syllabus” reading list for myself of female classics. I keep thinking that I wish I had spent some time at university doing literature electives before jumping straight into my degree, so I figured why not create my own course to fill in those literary gaps?
To give you an idea, in high school I remember reading Frankenstein, 1984, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Crucible, Twelfth Night and Slaughterhouse-Five. I’m kind of shocked that we never read any Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters’ novels. But given how sparse my experience with classics feels, I am a bit intimated – like I don’t think I could jump into a heavy 900 page Russian classic just yet. So the books I’ve picked seem to me like the ones I would like the most.
I normally read a lot of lit fic, not into fantasy. I tend to prefer moody “I hate my dad” intergenerational trauma messy woman in her 20s with a shitty boyfriend that hates her job and can’t get life together etc etc
So, recommend me a book – what would you add to a syllabus you were creating focusing on must read literary women?
The syllabus so far, in absolutely no order:
Jane Austen: Persuasion
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Toni Morrison: Beloved & The Bluest Eye (should I include Sula?)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaids Tale
Virginia Woolf: A Room of Ones Own
Iris Murdoch: The Sea, the Sea
Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wallpaper
Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar
Any specific recommendations from Deborah Levy’s body of work? She seems to come up a fair bit as contemporary author.
For other more contemporary works I’ve also got a lot of Joan Didion on my list, Eve Babitz, the Elena Ferrante quartet, Monkey Grip by Helen Garner, and Donna Tartt. To be honest, I don’t even really know what defines a book as either a classic, modern classic, or contemporary.
And I am planning on reading some male authors: East of Eden, Brave New World, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Animal Farm, and re-reading 1984.
Would love any recommendations – what’s essential? What’s overrated? Open to being educated! And thanks in advance, I know this was a wordy ass post lol
by Feeling_Spinach4396
16 Comments
I would add To The Lighthouse to the Woolf list.
Also all of these:
-The Awakening by Kate Chopin
-A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
-Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
-The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
-The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
-Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
-To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
On the more modern side:
-The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
-Krik? Krak! By Edwidge Danticat
-Anything by Audre Lorde
“Slouching Toward Bethlehem” or “The Year of Magical Thinking” would be solid Didion picks.
Also have to recommend Ursula LeGuin (“The Dispossessed” or “The Left Hand of Darkness”) and Madeline L’Engle “A Wrinkle in Time” for science fiction.
The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Mandarines by Simone de Beauvoir
A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilmanp
A popular banger from Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice. If you’re starting romance but also wanna know regency era and wanna read classics, this is the perfect read
The Garden Party and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Henry and June by Anaïs Nin
I don’t know how far back you’ll go to consider something a classic, but here are a few suggestions:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Katherine by Anya Seton
Kindred by Octavia Butler
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Passing by Nella Larson
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
The Mysterious Affair at Styles & Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (her 1st book/1st Poirot and her 1st Marple)
I would absolutely add Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Also The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
For contemporary novels, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a modern day masterpiece. I might also include Educated by Tara Westover.
* The Woman Warrior & China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
* Under the Feet of Jesus & Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena María Viramontes
* Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao
In addition to seconding all the Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K LeGuin, I’d add The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, and House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (or any of the other works of these authors).
ETA: check out r/weirdgirlliterature for more recs!
The pursuit of love and Love in a cold climate both by Nancy Mitford. I capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Cold comfort farm by Stella Gibbons. Marianne by Monica Dickens. High wages by Dorothy Whipple. Miss Pettigrew lives for a day by Winifred Watson. You are going to have so much fun!
Shirley Jackson is a must in my book.
Also Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty and Leslie Marmon Silko.
I’d include som Li Qingzhao if your tastes run toward poetry. She lived in 12th century China. Her work is available in a translation by a scholar (Ronald Egan) who has extensively studied her work. It’s available as an Open Access edition from the publisher, DeGruyter. There are also several Japanese works by women from roughly the same period that are well worth reading. These include As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams by Lady Sarashina, The Diary of Lady Murasaki by Murasaki Shikibu (who also wrote The Tale of Genji, often considered one of the world’s earliest novels, depending on how one defines novel), and The Kagerō Diary by Fujiwara no Michitsuna no Haha. All were written by elite women at court and offer vivid insights into their lives, relationships, and the hardships they faced.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harper
Middlemarch by George Eliot (a male pen name for Mary Ann Evans). You could also start with one of her shorter works, but Middlemarch is still my favorite after reading quite a few.