The 100 best moderately difficult books by women

No. 11 on this list. Emma · Jane Austen · 1815

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Included in: Great Books of the Western World, Oxford World's Classics

Emma is taught in virtually every survey of British literature and appears on most lists of essential novels. It is Austen's longest and most complex work, considered by some critics her masterpiece. The novel appears in high school AP courses, undergraduate surveys, and graduate seminars. It has been adapted countless times for film and television. Its status in the Western canon is unassailable, ranking just below Pride and Prejudice in popular awareness but equal or higher in critical estimation.

No. 12 on this list. The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood · 2017

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

The novel is a staple of high school and university courses on dystopia and feminist literature. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, appears on the 1001 Books list, and is published as a Penguin Modern Classic.

No. 13 on this list. Sense and Sensibility · Jane Austen · 1811

Taught in schools: OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), WJEC/Eduqas GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Austen first published novel. Less celebrated than Pride and Prejudice or Emma but firmly canonical.

No. 14 on this list. Jane Eyre · Charlotte Brontë · 1847

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Appears on 6,194 university syllabi according to Open Syllabus — placing it at the 94.8th percentile — and its Wikipedia article spans 59 languages with dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections. Jane Eyre is a fixture of Victorian literature courses worldwide and features on both the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature list and the BBC Big Read Top 100.

No. 15 on this list. Wolf Hall · Hilary Mantel · 2009

The historical novel that changed the genre's literary status. Thomas Cromwell's rise, rendered in present tense and close third person, made Tudor politics feel immediate. Core text in contemporary fiction and historical fiction courses.

No. 16 on this list. Their Eyes Were Watching God · Zora Neale Hurston · 1937

Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

Appears on 3,011 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project (86.97th percentile), placing it among the most-taught American novels. Featured on TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels list and published in prestigious Library of America and Everyman's Library editions — markers of sustained institutional recognition. Available in 9 Wikipedia languages, reflecting global reach in academic and literary circles.

No. 17 on this list. The Bluest Eye · Toni Morrison · 1970

Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

While not as universally canonical as Beloved, The Bluest Eye is firmly established in the American literary canon, widely taught in universities, and recognized as a landmark debut that announced a major voice in American letters.

No. 18 on this list. The Bell Jar · Sylvia Plath · 1963

The Bell Jar is required reading in virtually every American women's literature and confessional writing course, and appears widely in high school curricula addressing mental health and mid-century American life. It holds a secure place on Modern Library and similar essential reading lists, and remains one of the most assigned novels in discussions of feminist literary history.

No. 19 on this list. Paradise · Toni Morrison · 1999

As Morrison's seventh novel following her 1993 Nobel Prize, Paradise occupies secure canonical position. It completes Morrison's loose trilogy with Beloved and Jazz, cementing her exploration of African American historical trauma. The novel appears regularly on graduate syllabi and receives sustained scholarly attention. While perhaps less taught than Beloved or Song of Solomon, it represents mature-period Morrison at peak powers and contributes essential perspectives on black utopian communities, gender conflict, and religious violence.

No. 20 on this list. The Color Purple · Alice Walker · 1983

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Appears on 1,185 university syllabi according to Open Syllabus (76.8th percentile), making it a fixture of American literature, women's studies, and African American studies courses. Wikipedia articles in 22 languages reflect its global reach. Consistently listed in essential American fiction surveys, and the 1985 Spielberg film expanded its cultural footprint far beyond academic settings.

No. 21 on this list. Between the Acts · Virginia Woolf · 1941

It is a summer afternoon in June 1939, six weeks before England declares war. At Pointz Hall, a country house in the English south, the Oliver family — old Bartholomew, his daughter-in-law Isa, his son Giles, and his sister Lucy Swithin — gathers for the annual village pageant. The guests arrive: Mrs. Manresa, radiant and reckless; William Dodge, a clerk with a damaged secret. Miss La Trobe, the pageant's director, crouches behind a tree and curses the wind. The pageant runs through English history — Chaucer, Elizabeth I, the Victorians — using village actors, a sputtering gramophone, and a script always threatening to collapse. The audience half-follows, gossips about the vicar, and files out for tea. Meanwhile Isa carries an unspoken passion for a man in grey she has met only twice. Giles seethes at his own inaction as catastrophe approaches. Lucy broods on prehistory and fish. Woolf gives her final novel no plot to resolve. The pageant ends; the audience disperses; the gramophone gurgles "Unity — Dispersity" and stops mid-word. That evening, after the strangers leave, Isa and Giles are alone together for the first time all day — and the novel ends on two words: "They spoke." What came before those words, in the charged silences between the day's acts, is Woolf's entire subject: fragmented desires, incomplete sentences, and the swallows that have returned every summer since before civilization, and may return when it is gone.

No. 22 on this list. The Mirror and the Light · Hilary Mantel · 2020

The final book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, following Cromwell from Jane Seymours death to his own execution.

No. 23 on this list. Kindred · Octavia E. Butler · 1979

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Kindred is required reading in African American literature, American history, and science fiction courses at universities across the United States and internationally. It appears on the Modern Library's reader list of the 100 best novels and is frequently paired with primary sources on American slavery. Octavia Butler is the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, and Kindred is her most assigned work.

No. 24 on this list. Wide Sargasso Sea · Jean Rhys · 1966

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, WJEC/Eduqas GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

The postcolonial revision that changed how we read Jane Eyre. Antoinette/Bertha's story—the madwoman in the attic given voice—became essential feminist and postcolonial criticism. Core text in Caribbean literature and courses on literary rewriting.

No. 25 on this list. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde · Audre Lorde · 2020

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

No. 26 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. 27 on this list. The Ethics of Ambiguity · Simone de Beauvoir · 1947

De Beauvoir opens with a paradox: humans are the only creatures who know they will die and still must decide how to live. In this 1947 philosophical essay, she argues that existence is irreducibly ambiguous — we are simultaneously free subjects and objects in the world of others — and that any ethics worth having must start from that fact rather than flee it. She identifies several ways people flee. The serious man invests himself in external causes and calls it virtue. The nihilist scorns all values but remains secretly attached to them. The adventurer pursues his own expansion at others' expense. Each type is a form of bad faith — a refusal to acknowledge that freedom is not a private possession but always entangled with others' freedom. The argument builds toward a demand: genuine freedom requires working to free others. Oppression is not just a political crime; it is a philosophical contradiction — you cannot affirm your own freedom while denying it to those around you. De Beauvoir applies this to colonialism, Nazi Germany, and everyday moral cowardice with the same dry force. This is not a comfortable book. It asks the reader to face ambiguity without resolution — to act without certainty, to commit without guarantees. Philosophy students will recognize the debt to Sartre; the departure is de Beauvoir's insistence that ethics demands solidarity, not just authenticity.

No. 28 on this list. Voices from Chernobyl · Svetlana Alexievich · 1997

Widely recognized as the definitive literary account of Chernobyl and a landmark of documentary literature. The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature elevated its status, establishing Alexievich's polyphonic method as a major formal innovation. Required reading in post-Soviet studies and increasingly taught in world literature curricula. Its documentary approach has influenced contemporary non-fiction globally.

No. 29 on this list. The Haunting of Hill House · Shirley Jackson · 1959

The Haunting of Hill House is widely recognized as the definitive American haunted-house novel and one of the finest works of Gothic fiction in the English language. It has been continuously in print since 1959 and is regularly taught in university courses on American literature, Gothic studies, and the horror genre. Stephen King called its opening paragraph the finest in the history of horror fiction. It appears on virtually every serious list of essential horror and Gothic novels and has been adapted for film (twice) and television (the acclaimed 2018 Netflix series).

No. 30 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.