The shelf begins in 1792 with a political argument — Wollstonecraft’s Vindication — and only then turns to fiction, which is a fair picture of how the period went: women’s writing was first a claim on the public argument and then, through the novel, the place where that claim was tested in private life.
Forty-five books by twenty-five authors, from Udolpho and Sense and Sensibility to Mrs. Dalloway and the first Poirot novels. Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Gaskell, Alcott, Burnett, Wharton and Christie are all here in numbers, which is what makes the list useful: it shows how much of the canonical novel was written by women, not how little.
Every book by a woman author on this shelf
Forty-five titles by twenty-five authors, oldest first, 1792 to 1929.
| Year | Title | Author | Form | Words | Reading time |
|---|
| 1792 | A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | Mary Wollstonecraft | Political writing | 83,000 | 5 h |
| 1794 | The Mysteries of Udolpho | Ann Radcliffe | Novel | 290,000 | 16 h |
| 1811 | Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | Novel | 119,000 | 7 h |
| 1813 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | Novel | 122,000 | 7 h |
| 1814 | Mansfield Park | Jane Austen | Novel | 163,000 | 9 h |
| 1815 | Emma | Jane Austen | Novel | 161,000 | 9 h |
| 1817 | Northanger Abbey | Jane Austen | Novel | 80,264 | 4 h |
| 1817 | Persuasion | Jane Austen | Novel | 84,000 | 5 h |
| 1818 | Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus | Mary Shelley | Novel | 75,052 | 4 h |
| 1826 | The Last Man | Mary Shelley | Novel | 174,000 | 10 h |
| 1847 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | Novel | 185,000 | 10 h |
| 1847 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | Novel | 116,000 | 6 h |
| 1848 | The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë | Novel | 164,000 | 9 h |
| 1850 | Sonnets from the Portuguese | Elizabeth Barrett Browning | Verse | 5,700 | 1 h |
| 1852 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe | Novel | 180,000 | 10 h |
| 1853 | Cranford | Elizabeth Gaskell | Novel | 70,574 | 4 h |
| 1853 | Villette | Charlotte Brontë | Novel | 195,000 | 11 h |
| 1855 | North and South | Elizabeth Gaskell | Novel | 182,000 | 10 h |
| 1861 | Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl | Harriet Jacobs | Slave narrative | 81,000 | 5 h |
| 1861 | Silas Marner | George Eliot | Novel | 70,000 | 4 h |
| 1868 | Little Women | Louisa May Alcott | Novel | 201,000 | 11 h |
| 1871 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | Novel | 316,280 | 18 h |
| 1877 | Black Beauty | Anna Sewell | Novel | 63,007 | 4 h |
| 1892 | The Yellow Wallpaper | Charlotte Perkins Gilman | Novel | 6,052 | 1 h |
| 1899 | The Awakening | Kate Chopin | Novel | 67,080 | 4 h |
| 1903 | The Story of My Life | Helen Keller | Autobiography | 134,000 | 7 h |
| 1905 | A Little Princess | Frances Hodgson Burnett | Novel | 67,000 | 4 h |
| 1905 | The House of Mirth | Edith Wharton | Novel | 129,036 | 7 h |
| 1905 | The Scarlet Pimpernel | Baroness Orczy | Novel | 86,000 | 5 h |
| 1906 | The Railway Children | E. Nesbit | Novel | 60,000 | 3 h |
| 1911 | Ethan Frome | Edith Wharton | Novel | 34,619 | 2 h |
| 1911 | The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | Novel | 81,000 | 5 h |
| 1920 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | Novel | 101,000 | 6 h |
| 1920 | The Mysterious Affair at Styles | Agatha Christie | Novel | 59,580 | 3 h |
| 1922 | The Enchanted April | Elizabeth von Arnim | Novel | 78,345 | 4 h |
| 1922 | The Garden Party and Other Stories | Katherine Mansfield | Novel | 57,000 | 3 h |
| 1922 | The Secret Adversary | Agatha Christie | Novel | 78,347 | 4 h |
| 1923 | The Murder on the Links | Agatha Christie | Novel | 64,793 | 4 h |
| 1924 | The Man in the Brown Suit | Agatha Christie | Novel | 75,020 | 4 h |
| 1925 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | Novel | 64,000 | 4 h |
| 1925 | The Secret of Chimneys | Agatha Christie | Novel | 73,000 | 4 h |
| 1926 | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | Agatha Christie | Novel | 70,248 | 4 h |
| 1927 | The Big Four | Agatha Christie | Novel | 55,601 | 3 h |
| 1928 | The Mystery of the Blue Train | Agatha Christie | Novel | 70,132 | 4 h |
| 1929 | The Seven Dials Mystery | Agatha Christie | Novel | 65,307 | 4 h |
How this list was made
Gender comes from Wikidata’s sex or gender property for the author, normalised to female. Anonymous and pseudonymous authorship is resolved by the author page, not by the imprint.
Two authors appear with one book each because only one of their titles is in the public domain in the United States. Word counts are for the editions here.
Questions readers ask
Where should I start?
Pride and Prejudice if you want the comic masterpiece; Jane Eyre if you want the Gothic; Middlemarch if you want the whole nineteenth century in one book.
Why so many detective novels at the end?
Because Christie’s early Poirot books are 1920s and public domain, and they are among the most read books on the site. The shelf is data, not a canon.
Is this list only fiction?
No. It includes Wollstonecraft’s argument, Douglass’s and Jacobs’s narratives, and books of poems such as Sonnets from the Portuguese.
Part of all themed reading lists. Nearby shelves: Russian Classics · French Classics · American Classics · authors A–Z · word counts and reading times.
