Without women, some pretty amazing things wouldn't exist [1]. Book-lovers know best that women have changed the world in so many important ways — oftentimes, with their words. We've rounded up more than 80 novels, essays, poem collections, and memoirs written by female writers. Everyone should read these literary works in their lifetimes.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith [2]
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [3]
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt [4]
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou [5]
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë [6]
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank [7]
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker [8]
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende [9]
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley [10]
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde [11]
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones [12]
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall [13]
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë [14]
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu [15]
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros [16]
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood [17]
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys [18]
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters [19]
A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki [20]
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder [21]
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan [22]
We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [23]
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath [24]
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf [25]
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing [26]
The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir [27]
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion [28]
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling [29]
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir [30]
Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon [31]
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan [32]
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri [33]
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery [34]
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls [35]
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand [36]
Ain't I a Woman by bell hooks [37]
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins [38]
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings [39]
My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult [40]
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [41]
Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce [42]
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson [43]
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott [44]
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman [45]
Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye [46]
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang [47]
Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector [48]
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown [49]
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton [50]
The Giver by Lois Lowry [51]
The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck [52]
Beloved by Toni Morrison [53]
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf [54]
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie [55]
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson [56]
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton [57]
Middlemarch by George Eliot [58]
Wild by Cheryl Strayed [59]
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston [60]
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell [61]
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke [62]
My Antonia by Willa Cather [63]
Poems New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska [64]
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton [65]
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen [66]
The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro [67]
Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice [68]
Jubilee by Margaret Walker [69]
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle [70]
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers [71]
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith [72]
Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion [73]
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai [74]
Passing by Nella Larsen [75]
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton [76]
Heroines by Kate Zambreno [77]
White Teeth by Zadie Smith [78]
Kindred by Octavia Butler [79]
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen [80]
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy [81]
Obasan by Joy Kogawa [82]
Nightwood by Djuna Barnes [83]
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi [84]
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier [85]
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison [86]
Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya [87]
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay [88]