Popsugar Love & Sex Women's History Month Best Books by Women 87 Books by Women You Should Read Before You Die 23 June 2018 by Hilary White Image Source: StockSnap / Freestocks Without women, some pretty amazing things wouldn't exist. 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 1 / 87 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2 / 87 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 3 / 87 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou 4 / 87 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë 5 / 87 The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank 6 / 87 The Colour Purple by Alice Walker 7 / 87 The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende 8 / 87 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 9 / 87 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde 10 / 87 Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones 11 / 87 The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall 12 / 87 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 13 / 87 The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu 14 / 87 The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros 15 / 87 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood 16 / 87 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 17 / 87 Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters 18 / 87 A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki 19 / 87 Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder 20 / 87 The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan 21 / 87 We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 22 / 87 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath 23 / 87 A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf 24 / 87 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing 25 / 87 The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir 26 / 87 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 27 / 87 Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling 28 / 87 The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir 29 / 87 Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon 30 / 87 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan 31 / 87 The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri 32 / 87 Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery 33 / 87 The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls 34 / 87 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand 35 / 87 Ain't I a Woman by bell hooks 36 / 87 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 37 / 87 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings 38 / 87 My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult 39 / 87 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 40 / 87 Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce 41 / 87 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson 42 / 87 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott 43 / 87 The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman 44 / 87 Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye 45 / 87 Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang 46 / 87 Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector 47 / 87 Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown 48 / 87 The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 49 / 87 The Giver by Lois Lowry 50 / 87 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck 51 / 87 Beloved by Toni Morrison 52 / 87 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 53 / 87 And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie 54 / 87 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson 55 / 87 The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton 56 / 87 Middlemarch by George Eliot 57 / 87 Wild by Cheryl Strayed 58 / 87 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 59 / 87 Swamplandia! by Karen Russell 60 / 87 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke 61 / 87 My Antonia by Willa Cather 62 / 87 Poems New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska 63 / 87 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton 64 / 87 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 65 / 87 The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro 66 / 87 Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice 67 / 87 Jubilee by Margaret Walker 68 / 87 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle 69 / 87 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers 70 / 87 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 71 / 87 Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion 72 / 87 I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai 73 / 87 Passing by Nella Larsen 74 / 87 The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton 75 / 87 Heroines by Kate Zambreno 76 / 87 White Teeth by Zadie Smith 77 / 87 Kindred by Octavia Butler 78 / 87 The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen 79 / 87 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy 80 / 87 Obasan by Joy Kogawa 81 / 87 Nightwood by Djuna Barnes 82 / 87 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi 83 / 87 Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier 84 / 87 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 85 / 87 Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya 86 / 87 Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay 87 / 87 Women's History MonthInternational Women's DayBook LoversWomenBooks