The Greatest Books of All Time on Female Authorship
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This list represents a comprehensive and trusted collection of the greatest books. Developed through a specialized algorithm, it brings together 759 'best of' book lists to form a definitive guide to the world's most acclaimed books. For those interested in how these books are chosen, additional details can be found on the rankings page.
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"Female authorship" as a book category denotes works written by women and femme-identifying authors (across cultures and histories) and/or books that explicitly foreground the experience, voice, craft or study of women writers. It is not a single literary genre but a curatorial label that can include fiction, poetry, memoir, biography, criticism and scholarship; it highlights perspectives shaped by gender, amplifies underrepresented voices, recovers historical women writers, and engages themes such as identity, family, power, and social change. The category also invites an intersectional view—acknowledging differences of race, class, sexuality, ability and nationality among women—and serves both to celebrate diverse creative contributions and to challenge a traditionally male-dominated literary canon.
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1. Katherine Mansfield by Gerri Kimber
A concise biography that follows her journey from childhood in New Zealand to her expatriate life in Europe, exploring the personal relationships, artistic struggles and tuberculosis that shaped her brief but influential career; it situates her modernist innovations in the short story—impressionistic detail, psychological insight and subtle social critique—within the context of her friendships, love affairs and public reception, and offers an assessment of her literary legacy and continuing influence on 20th-century fiction.
The 13135th Greatest Book of All TimePurchase from Bookshop.org
Reading Statistics
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Download
If you're interested in downloading this list as a CSV file for use in a spreadsheet application, you can easily do so by clicking the button below. Please note that to ensure a manageable file size and faster download, the CSV will include details for only the first 500 books.
DownloadTo download this list as a CSV file, please log in to your account. Once logged in, you'll be able to download the data for use in spreadsheet applications.
Login to Download