From Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante to Sylvia Plath, these are the female novelists we think you should know and read.
March is the month dedicated to women’s history, and what’s better than supporting women to celebrate it? One of the best things to do to champion gender equality is to maximise female voices and promote female-gaze.
To celebrate women and female voices, we decided to dedicate this month to share some of our favourite artists, novelists, directors – all the women that, with their work, elevate all of us.
There are so many historical figures that most of us would have studied at school, so we didn’t add the famous Jane Austin, Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters to our list, but we definitely suggest you read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre if you haven’t done already.
If you want to have a long list of authors to discover every time you finish a book, we suggest you get yourself a copy of Literary Witches by Taisia Kitaiskaia (beautifully illustrated by Katy Horan) – hundreds of pages of inspiration await. But for now, here are some of our favourite female novelists that we think you should know and read.
Toni Morrison
Buy Beloved by Toni Morrison here.
Zadie Smith
Buy Swing Time by Zadie Smith here.
Margaret Atwood
Buy The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood here.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Buy Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie here.
Elena Ferrante
Buy My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante here.
Maya Angelou
Buy I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou here.
Roxane Gay
Buy Difficult Women by Roxane Gay here.
Nora Ephron
Buy Heartburn by Nora Ephron here.
Sylvia Plath
Buy The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath here.
Alice Walker
Buy The Colour Purple by Alice Walker here.