The 25 best books by women

There is no avoiding the bitter truth: the literary canon remains dominated by the works of men.

History has seen its share of breakthrough successes  from Jane Austen to the Brontës but each woman who has carved her name in the hall of fame only did so after she overcame the various obstacles faced by those of her gender.

At different periods in time, women have been denied education, denied agency and denied access.

Their work has been dismissed as light, inconsequential, too romantic or without intellectual merit.

Some, like Mary Anne Evans, found the need to write under the guise of a man in order to be heard at all we know her better now as George Eliot.

The situation has improved greatly since Eliot’s days, but discrimination is still rampant in literary industry.

International Women’s Day is the  perfect time to consider how we can make a change.

There is so much brilliant work out there which not only has failed to receive its dues, but has been robbed of the opportunity to deepen our own experiences.

In that light, here’s a list of some of the very best books written by women.

• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
• Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  
• The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
• Kindred – Octavia E Butler
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
  
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• White Teeth – Zadie Smith
• The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector
• Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories – Flannery O’Connor
• Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi
• Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
• Beloved – Toni Morrison
• Middlemarch – George Eliot
• Little Fires Everywhere – Celeste Ng
• The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
• My Brilliant Friend - Elena Ferrante
• The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
• Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie
• The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu