The 71 best postwar and mid-century books by women

No. 11 on this list. Dance of the Happy Shades · Alice Munro · 1968

As Munro's debut collection and winner of the 1968 Governor General's Award, this book established her as a major voice in short fiction. It's widely taught in Canadian literature courses and remains essential to understanding the development of the contemporary short story. Munro's subsequent Nobel Prize (2013) has reinforced this collection's canonical importance.

No. 12 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. 13 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. 14 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. 15 on this list. The Passion According to G.H. · Clarice Lispector · 1964

Taught in schools: FUVEST leituras obrigatórias (USP vestibular) (Brazil)

No syllabus appearances or Wikipedia data were found in the database, but Lispector's standing in world literature is considerable. The Passion According to G.H. is widely cited as her masterwork and appears regularly in academic world literature, Latin American literature, and feminist theory syllabi internationally. It appears on Penguin Classics lists and several 'best novels ever' lists. Its canonical standing is higher in literary/academic circuits than in general readership, comparable to Beckett's The Unnamable — revered by specialists, unknown to general audiences.

No. 16 on this list. A Wizard of Earthsea · Ursula K Le Guin · 1968

A Wizard of Earthsea appears regularly on university syllabi for science fiction and fantasy literature courses, and its Wikipedia article exists in dozens of language editions — a reliable indicator of global reach. It sits on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books and features on virtually every canonical fantasy reading list compiled since the 1970s.

No. 17 on this list. Pippi Longstocking · Astrid Lindgren · 1945

Taught in schools: Lithuanian literature curriculum (lietuvių kalba ir literatūra)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Pippi Longstocking is translated into over 70 languages and has sold more than 140 million copies worldwide, making it one of the most widely distributed children's books ever published. It is standard reading in Swedish schools and appears on canonical children's literature lists across Europe and beyond. While not a fixture of university literature syllabi, it holds an unassailable position in the children's literature canon globally.

No. 18 on this list. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie · Muriel Spark · 1961

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Regularly taught in British literature and women's studies courses, considered essential modern Scottish fiction. Appears on A-level syllabi and university 20th-century literature surveys. Not as universally taught as The Great Gatsby, but firmly established in academic curricula focused on postwar British fiction and modernist technique.

No. 19 on this list. To Kill a Mockingbird · Harper Lee · 1961

Taught in schools: Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English (0475), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Appears on 1,674 university syllabi (80.6th percentile, Open Syllabus Project) and is a fixture of American high school and university English curricula. Wikipedia articles exist in 58 languages with dedicated reception and adaptations sections. Published by four prestige houses — Library of America, Everyman's Library, Penguin Classics, and Penguin Modern Classics — confirming its standing in the Western canon.

No. 20 on this list. Arturo's Island · Elsa Morante · 1957

Winner of the Premio Strega in 1957, Italy's most prestigious literary prize, Arturo's Island is firmly established in the Italian literary canon and taught extensively in Italian schools and universities. It appears regularly on international world-literature lists and is considered one of the defining Italian novels of the twentieth century, alongside works by Pavese and Calvino.

No. 21 on this list. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter · Katherine Anne Porter · 1966

Stories such as 'Flowering Judas', 'The Jilting of Granny Weatherall' and 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider' are standard in American literature anthologies and short-story courses. The Library of America collected the stories in 2008.

No. 22 on this list. Family Lexicon · Natalia Ginzburg · 1963

Family Lexicon won the Premio Strega in 1963, Italy's most prestigious literary prize, and is consistently listed among the essential works of twentieth-century Italian literature. It appears regularly on university syllabi in Italian Studies and European literature courses, though its international syllabus presence is smaller than that of Ginzburg's more widely translated contemporaries like Calvino or Pavese.

No. 23 on this list. Family Ties · Clarice Lispector · 1960

Family Ties appears regularly on comparative literature and Latin American literature syllabi worldwide, and Lispector is among the most studied Lusophone writers in university world literature courses. No syllabus count was captured in the database, but her work has sustained continuous academic inclusion since the 1960s. Hélène Cixous's book-length critical study of Lispector (The Stream Running Nowhere) cemented the collection's place in the Western literary canon.

No. 24 on this list. The Ravishing of Lol Stein · Marguerite Duras · 1964

On Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein is a standard text in French literature courses and in feminist and psychoanalytic criticism. It is less widely read in English than The Lover.

No. 25 on this list. Moderato Cantabile · Marguerite Duras · 1958

Moderato Cantabile is a cornerstone of French postwar literature and the nouveau roman movement, taught widely in French, Francophone, and European literature programs. Though no syllabus data was found in the database, the work is among Duras's most discussed novels and appears consistently in courses on 20th-century French fiction, feminist literature, and literary minimalism. Its canonical status is stronger in Europe than in English-language curricula.

No. 26 on this list. The Country Girls · Edna O'Brien · 1960

A landmark of Irish literature and a foundational text for the frank depiction of women's experience. Widely taught and discussed.

No. 27 on this list. The Earthsea Quartet · Ursula K Le Guin · 1968

Across four novels spanning decades, Le Guin builds the archipelago of Earthsea—a world of islands, sailing, and true-name magic where knowing a thing's true name gives power over it. A Wizard of Earthsea follows the young wizard Ged as he releases a shadow-creature and must pursue it across the world. The Tombs of Atuan follows a priestess freed from underground servitude. The Farthest Shore follows Ged, now Archmage, pursuing a wizard who has broken the boundary between life and death. Tehanu, written sixteen years later, returns to Earthsea with a feminist perspective, following the abused child Therru and the former priestess Tenar in a world where women's power has been systematically suppressed. Le Guin's magic system—where speaking a true name is the fundamental magical act—is the most elegant in fantasy. The prose is spare, rhythmic, and precise, closer to myth than novel.

No. 28 on this list. Live or Die · Anne Sexton · 1966

Anne Sexton arranged these thirty-three poems in the order she wrote them — January 1962 to February 1966 — and called the result 'a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy.' Each poem arrives with a date at the bottom, evidence rather than ornament. The collection opens with her father, a wool salesman who drank in his bedroom and died on the road; within pages she has checked herself into a psychiatric ward, addressed Sylvia Plath's corpse ('Thief!— how did you crawl into, crawl down alone into the death I wanted so badly'), mourned a son she never had, and watched her daughter call on God instead of her mother when a horse crushes her foot. Sexton's language stays in the body. She counts out eight pharmaceutical capsules each night, arranges them 'as in the laying on of hands or the black sacrament.' Suicides, she observes, 'have a special language. Like carpenters they want to know which tools. They never ask why build.' The hospital and the suburban kitchen share equal authority. God appears, and Mary, and Judas, and Sylvia, and none of them offer adequate answers. The final poem, 'Live,' turns the collection's entire argument on its axis. Eight Dalmatian puppies survive the pails of water that waited to drown them. 'I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take.' The fever chart ends with a temperature that isn't, finally, fatal. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection that defined confessional poetry as a form capable of sustaining both unbearable honesty and survival.

No. 29 on this list. The Golden Apples · Eudora Welty · 1949

Virgie Rainey swallowed a button the day King MacLain came back to Morgana and then fled his own front porch before knocking. That's where Eudora Welty's sequence of seven stories begins—with a gossipy neighbor churning butter and narrating what she barely witnessed. The Golden Apples spans fifty years of life in Morgana, Mississippi: King's twin sons growing up without him, the German piano teacher Miss Eckhart pouring Beethoven into children who will barely remember her, a girl nearly drowning at a summer camp while a boy scout named Loch Morrison watches from the bank with the calculating dispassion of someone taking notes. Welty writes in multiple voices, each distinct—the vernacular monologue of 'Shower of Gold,' the double-stranded telescope-and-memory narration of 'June Recital,' the hallucinatory street-walking of 'Music from Spain'—and all of them circle the same problem: what we owe one another across the distance of separate selves. The book's mythological scaffolding (Perseus, Orpheus, Zeus's golden shower, Yeats's wandering Aengus) operates beneath the surface, surfacing only in charged moments. The final image—Virgie on a courthouse stile in October rain, hearing through it 'the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon's crusty slither'—earns its strangeness. This is literary fiction that demands full attention and rewards rereading.

No. 30 on this list. Half a Lifelong Romance · Eileen Chang · 1948

Widely taught in Chinese literature courses at universities across the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland, and featured in world literature syllabi as a defining work of twentieth-century Chinese fiction. The novel is considered one of Eileen Chang's masterworks and appears on curated lists of essential modern Chinese literature. Its status outside Chinese-language contexts is more specialized than canonical in the Western sense.