The 43 best books about science and discovery by women

The title essay 'The Death of the Moth' is one of the most anthologized pieces in the English language, appearing in virtually every major collection of literary essays and countless university writing courses. Though the collection as a whole is less individually indexed than Woolf's novels, these essays — alongside 'Street Haunting' and 'Middlebrow' — are fixtures of modernist prose and creative nonfiction curricula worldwide.

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.

Tayo comes home from the Pacific War unable to sleep. The voices won't stop—Japanese soldiers shouting, his uncle Josiah calling to him through jungle heat, his cousin Rocky dying in the mud of a prison march. The VA hospital calls it battle fatigue. His grandmother calls for a medicine man. The land around Laguna Pueblo is in its sixth year of drought, and Tayo believes, with a guilt that sits in his stomach like a stone, that he caused it—that his wartime curse against the rain followed him home. Silko writes two novels at once: a realist account of a mixed-blood veteran's breakdown and his slow return to the living, and a mythic narrative of Laguna ceremony, the stories of Thought-Woman and Reed Woman and Hummingbird woven directly into the prose as poetry. The two registers don't sit beside each other—they bleed into each other, memory becoming hallucination, hallucination becoming vision, vision becoming healing. The spotted Mexican cattle Josiah bought before the war, wild and drought-adapted and worth finding, serve as Tayo's purpose and his proof that something can survive. The novel ends with resolution—Tayo completes his ceremony, the rain returns—but not before Silko has made plain what was nearly lost: the web of story that holds a people together, which colonial schooling nearly succeeded in cutting. This is a novel about what stories do when they are the only medicine left.

The Tombs of Atuan is the second volume of Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, which has been a staple of middle school and YA curricula for decades. It won the Newbery Honor in 1972. While not as universally taught as the first Earthsea volume or Le Guin's science fiction, it appears regularly in fantasy literature courses and feminist literary criticism syllabi, cementing its place as a significant canonical text within speculative fiction.

While not as frequently taught as Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, The Voyage Out appears on modernist literature syllabi and Woolf survey courses. As the first novel by one of English literature's most canonical authors, it holds a secure but secondary place in the canon compared to her later masterworks.

The Accidental has achieved recognition as a significant 21st-century British novel, appearing on university syllabi and contemporary fiction reading lists. While not yet established in the permanent canon, it represents Smith's breakthrough to major literary prominence and exemplifies post-2000 experimental domestic fiction. Its status continues to grow with Smith's increasing reputation.

Always Coming Home appears on 72 university syllabi according to Open Syllabus Project data (46th percentile), primarily in science fiction, utopian literature, and feminist studies courses. Its Wikipedia article exists in only 4 languages — modest global reach for a book of this ambition. The book is well-known within Le Guin scholarship and SF studies but has not achieved the broad canonical presence of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. It was a National Book Award finalist in 1985 and is included in the Library of America's Le Guin edition, which confirms critical recognition without mass adoption.

Szymborska's poems are deceptively simple, their philosophical depths hidden beneath conversational surfaces. She writes about clouds and dreams and history, about the way reality keeps escaping our categories. 'We know ourselves only / as far as we've been tested.' This collection gathers work from across her career, establishing her as one of the essential voices of twentieth-century poetry. She won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for poems that are funny, humble, and vast.

The Earthsea cycle appears widely on science fiction and speculative fiction syllabi, and this third volume, the National Book Award winner for 1973, is firmly part of that canon. It is less commonly assigned than A Wizard of Earthsea but holds strong placement in fantasy literature courses and children's/YA literature curricula. Its Wikipedia article exists in over fifteen languages, indicating sustained international recognition.

Widely taught in feminist literary studies, utopian fiction, and American literature courses since its 1976 publication, the novel holds a firm place in academic syllabi as a landmark of feminist science fiction. No syllabus count data is available, but its sustained presence across women's studies and speculative fiction curricula for five decades marks it as canonical within those fields, comparable in reach to other key feminist texts of the second wave.