The 100 best books about identity and the self by women

No. 11 on this list. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde · Audre Lorde · 2020

Lorde is taught across literature, gender studies and Black studies.

No. 12 on this list. The Golden Notebook · Doris Lessing · 1962

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

The Golden Notebook appears on 139 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project (53rd percentile) and is listed in Open Syllabus's Top 500 Literature titles. It appears on TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels list (2005) and holds Wikipedia articles in 20 languages. It is a standard text in women's literature, postcolonial literature, and 20th-century British fiction courses, though not at the frequency of The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird.

No. 13 on this list. The Left Hand of Darkness · Ursula K Le Guin · 1969

Genly Ai, a human envoy from a galactic coalition called the Ekumen, arrives on the planet Gethen to invite its people into interstellar fellowship. The planet is locked in an ice age, and its inhabitants possess a biology that would reshape how any visitor understands human nature: Gethenians have no fixed sex, spending most of each month in a neuter state before entering 'kemmer,' a brief fertile period during which they become randomly male or female. Genly must navigate the treacherous politics of two rival nations, Karhide and Orgoreyn, while struggling against his own deeply ingrained assumptions about gender. His most important relationship is with Estraven, a disgraced Karhidish politician whose motives Genly cannot read through the fog of his own gendered expectations. Their harrowing journey across an arctic ice sheet strips away politics, culture, and prejudice, forcing a communion between two beings who must learn to see each other without the categories that have shaped their perceptions. Le Guin constructs the novel as a mosaic of voices: Genly's diplomatic report, Estraven's spare journal, Gethenian myths and legends, and anthropological field notes, each offering a partial and unreliable perspective on a world that resists totalizing description. The prose is crystalline and unhurried, moving between political intrigue, philosophical reflection, and passages of extraordinary landscape writing as the two travelers cross the Gobrin Ice. The embedded myths refract the novel's central concerns with duality, betrayal, and the inseparability of light and darkness.

No. 14 on this list. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza · Gloria Anzaldua · 1987

Foundational text of Chicana feminism, border studies, and queer theory. Universally taught in relevant fields.

No. 15 on this list. Wise Blood · Flannery O'Connor · 1952

A landmark of Southern Gothic fiction and American literature, widely taught and critically analyzed. One of the defining novels of postwar American fiction.

No. 16 on this list. Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva · Marina Tsvetaeva

Tsvetaeva is firmly established as one of the four great Russian poets of the twentieth century, alongside Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak.

No. 17 on this list. The Plague of Doves · Louise Erdrich · 2008

Pulitzer Prize finalist (2009) and the first entry in a trilogy whose second volume, The Round House, won the National Book Award. Taught in university courses on contemporary American and Native American literature, with an established academic presence in postcolonial and ethnic studies. Widely regarded as one of Erdrich's most formally accomplished novels.

No. 18 on this list. Villette · Charlotte Brontë · 1853

Widely taught in advanced 19th-century literature courses and Victorian fiction seminars, though less ubiquitous than Jane Eyre. Contemporary scholarship increasingly positions Villette as Brontë's most sophisticated novel; it appears regularly on university syllabi in feminist literary criticism and psychological realism tracks.

No. 19 on this list. The Time of the Doves · Mercè Rodoreda · 1962

The undisputed masterpiece of twentieth-century Catalan literature. Widely translated and recognized as one of the great European novels of the postwar period.

No. 20 on this list. Diving into the Wreck · Adrienne Rich · 1973

The title poem appears in virtually every major American poetry anthology and is standard reading in feminist literature, American poetry, and contemporary poetry courses. The collection sits firmly in the literary canon, comparable to Beloved (85) in academic reach if not in the broadest syllabi. No database data was returned, but Rich's place in American poetry curricula is well established.

No. 21 on this list. Runaway · Alice Munro · 2004

One of Munro's most celebrated collections, frequently cited as the peak of her mature work. Winner of the Giller Prize and numerous international honors.

No. 22 on this list. The Conservationist · Nadine Gordimer · 1974

Mehring, a wealthy Johannesburg industrialist, has purchased a farm outside the city—less for profit than as refuge from his collapsing marriage, his estranged radical son, and his unsatisfying affair. When a dead Black man is found on his land, hastily buried by police who cannot identify the body, Mehring treats it as bureaucratic nuisance rather than moral crisis. He prides himself on being a progressive landowner who pays fair wages and respects his workers, yet his liberalism cannot acknowledge the corpse as ancestral claim or historical reckoning. Gordimer narrates through Mehring's evasive consciousness, her prose registering the minutiae of farm management—cattle diseases, pasture conditions, labor arrangements—while circling obsessively around the burial site he tries to forget. The narrative crosscuts between his weekend visits and the farm's rhythms in his absence, where workers Jacobus and Solomon maintain routines inflected by meanings Mehring cannot access. When floods exhume the body, the workers perform proper burial rites, restoring him to the land in ceremonies that supersede Mehring's title deeds. Gordimer withholds resolution: Mehring remains uncomprehending, his ownership revealed as legal fiction layered atop deeper claims the novel anatomizes but does not resolve.

No. 23 on this list. Six Feet of the Country · Nadine Gordimer · 1956

Widely recognized as a cornerstone of post-colonial and South African literature. Appears consistently in university curricula and anthologies of significant twentieth-century short fiction. Represents a crucial moment in articulating apartheid-era social consciousness.

No. 24 on this list. The Awakening · Kate Chopin · 1899

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Required reading in virtually every American literature survey course and a fixture on feminist literary syllabi. The novel was suppressed and dismissed as scandalous at publication in 1899, then recovered and canonized in the 1960s–70s by feminist critics; it now appears on thousands of university syllabi and is considered one of the foundational texts of American women's literature.

No. 25 on this list. Tar Baby · Toni Morrison · 1981

On Isle des Chevaliers, a Caribbean island reshaped by Haitian labor and American money, Valerian Street — a retired Philadelphia candy magnate — cultivates hydrangeas in his greenhouse and avoids his neighbors. His wife Margaret, his butler Sydney and cook Ondine, and his niece Jadine, a model trained in Paris, share the villa in a state of maintained tension. When Son — a Black American fugitive who stowed away on their supply boat — is discovered hiding in the house, he breaks open every unspoken arrangement the household depends on. Morrison uses the folk tale of the tar baby as the novel's armature: Jadine and Son become stuck to each other in a relationship that neither can survive and neither can leave. She embodies what he calls racial betrayal — educated in Europe, photographed in furs, at home nowhere. He embodies what she calls romantic primitivism — a man out of time, faithful to a Black Southern past that she finds suffocating. Morrison writes this conflict without a referee. The Caribbean setting is not backdrop but argument — the swamp, the rain forest, the blind horsemen who ride the hills at night all carry the weight of African spiritual history beneath the colonial surface. The novel ends on a mythic image: Son running toward those horsemen, Jadine flying back to Paris. Morrison offers no verdict on who was right.

No. 26 on this list. Persepolis · Marjane Satrapi · 2000

Persepolis is one of the most widely taught graphic narratives in schools and universities, a standard text in courses on memoir, comics and the modern Middle East. It sits beside Art Spiegelman's Maus at the core of the graphic-memoir curriculum.

No. 27 on this list. Housekeeping · Marilynne Robinson · 1980

The most beautiful first novel of its generation. Ruth and Lucille's lives in Fingerbone, Idaho, Sylvie's transient existence—Robinson wrote prose like no one else. Core text in American literature courses. The novel launched a major career.

No. 28 on this list. The Lottery and Other Stories · Shirley Jackson · 1949

The title story 'The Lottery' is one of the most anthologized and taught short stories in the American canon, appearing in virtually every introduction-to-fiction textbook. The collection itself appears regularly on American short-story syllabi. Jackson's work has experienced a major critical reassessment since the 2010s, elevating her from genre curiosity to recognized American master.

No. 29 on this list. The Mill on the Floss · George Eliot · 1860

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Firmly established in the Victorian literature curriculum and regularly taught in surveys of 19th-century British fiction. It stands as Eliot's second-most-studied novel after 'Middlemarch,' valued for its feminist themes, psychological depth, and semi-autobiographical portrayal of female intellectual awakening in a restrictive provincial society.

No. 30 on this list. The House on Mango Street · Sandra Cisneros · 1984

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

One of the most widely taught works in American secondary and university curricula, particularly in Chicano/Latino literature, women's studies, and multicultural American literature courses. It has appeared on thousands of syllabi since the 1980s and is included on numerous lists of essential American literary texts, placing it firmly in the secondary canon alongside works like Beloved.