ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The 100 best books by women

Ranked by literary regard across ReadingRate's full catalogue, the best books by women open with Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji — arguably the first novel ever written. This list ranks the top 100, each with difficulty scores and reading-time estimates.

This is a computed ranking, not a curated one: the 100 highest literary-regard scores in our catalogue among works by women. That method has a virtue — nobody's taste put a thumb on the scale — and a stated limit: regard data reflects the canon's own history of attention, which long under-recorded women's writing.

1–10

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988, difficulty 5.8/10)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813, difficulty 5.2/10)
3. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (1010, difficulty 6.3/10)
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871, difficulty 5.4/10)
5. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965, difficulty 7.6/10)
6. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818, difficulty 6.8/10)
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847, difficulty 7.3/10)
8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927, difficulty 7.0/10)
9. Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (1963, difficulty 7.1/10)
10. Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, difficulty 8.8/10)

11–20

11. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972, difficulty 5.8/10)
12. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, difficulty 5.9/10)
13. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler (1989, difficulty 5.8/10)
14. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1955, difficulty 4.2/10)
15. Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro (1990, difficulty 7.2/10)
16. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949, difficulty 5.8/10)
17. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf by Virginia Woolf (1966, difficulty 5.4/10)
18. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847, difficulty 5.4/10)
19. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811, difficulty 5.3/10)
20. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969, difficulty 6.7/10)

21–30

21. Emma by Jane Austen (1815, difficulty 5.6/10)
22. This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga (1981, difficulty 6.0/10)
23. Poem Without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova (1960, difficulty 8.1/10)
24. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977, difficulty 6.8/10)
25. The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert (1979, difficulty 6.3/10)
26. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929, difficulty 5.7/10)
27. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009, difficulty 6.0/10)
28. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817, difficulty 5.4/10)
29. The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931, difficulty 7.5/10)
30. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970, difficulty 5.9/10)

31–40

31. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963, difficulty 4.7/10)
32. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962, difficulty 4.0/10)
33. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok (1978, difficulty 4.3/10)
34. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928, difficulty 4.5/10)
35. The Art of Memory by Frances Yates (1966, difficulty 6.9/10)
36. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf (1942, difficulty 7.6/10)
37. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, difficulty 6.3/10)
38. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Lewalski (1979, difficulty 6.3/10)
39. Happening by Annie Ernaux (2000, difficulty 6.6/10)
40. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1986, difficulty 8.1/10)

41–50

41. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (1947, difficulty 7.5/10)
42. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development by Elizabeth Abel (1983, difficulty 6.6/10)
43. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1980, difficulty 6.5/10)
44. Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941, difficulty 5.8/10)
45. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962, difficulty 7.1/10)
46. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature by Martha Nussbaum (1990, difficulty 6.5/10)
47. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (2020, difficulty 5.1/10)
48. A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter (1977, difficulty 6.0/10)
49. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963, difficulty 6.4/10)
50. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976, difficulty 4.6/10)

51–60

51. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983, difficulty 4.9/10)
52. Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop (1976, difficulty 7.8/10)
53. The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf (1925, difficulty 5.1/10)
54. Paradise by Toni Morrison (1999, difficulty 6.5/10)
55. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814, difficulty 5.4/10)
56. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua (1987, difficulty 4.0/10)
57. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979, difficulty 6.3/10)
58. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969, difficulty 5.7/10)
59. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966, difficulty 6.4/10)
60. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999, difficulty 7.8/10)

61–70

61. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry (1985, difficulty 7.0/10)
62. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968, difficulty 4.7/10)
63. The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova (1999, difficulty 7.1/10)
64. The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir (1947, difficulty 5.8/10)
65. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952, difficulty 4.4/10)
66. Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva by Marina Tsvetaeva (1979, difficulty 5.2/10)
67. Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro (1968, difficulty 5.2/10)
68. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852, difficulty 4.3/10)
69. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (1997, difficulty 5.6/10)
70. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1937, difficulty 2.9/10)

71–80

71. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (1922, difficulty 7.5/10)
72. Waiting for God by Simone Weil (1950, difficulty 6.5/10)
73. The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous (1975, difficulty 7.7/10)
74. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015, difficulty 8.0/10)
75. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe by Lisa Jardine (1986, difficulty 6.3/10)
76. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959, difficulty 5.6/10)
77. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984, difficulty 5.7/10)
78. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961, difficulty 3.9/10)
79. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin (1973, difficulty 6.7/10)
80. Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska (2015, difficulty 5.8/10)

81–90

81. Runaway by Alice Munro (2004, difficulty 4.5/10)
82. The White Album by Joan Didion (1979, difficulty 5.1/10)
83. Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis (1981, difficulty 4.8/10)
84. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative by Wendy B. Faris (2004, difficulty 6.5/10)
85. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940, difficulty 5.4/10)
86. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (2008, difficulty 7.7/10)
87. Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska by Wisława Szymborska (1998, difficulty 4.2/10)
88. Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag (2003, difficulty 5.4/10)
89. Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich (1973, difficulty 7.2/10)
90. The Case of Peter Rabbit: Changing Conditions of Literature for Children by Sheila Egoff (1996, difficulty 6.7/10)

91–100

91. The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (1002, difficulty 6.5/10)
92. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison (1992, difficulty 5.2/10)
93. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (2014, difficulty 7.3/10)
94. Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853, difficulty 5.8/10)
95. Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man by Barbara Reynolds (2006, difficulty 5.7/10)
96. The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (1998, difficulty 4.6/10)
97. The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda (1962, difficulty 3.3/10)
98. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974, difficulty 6.1/10)
99. Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (1938, difficulty 5.2/10)
100. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (1979, difficulty 7.7/10)