In celebration of International Women’s Day, we invite you to browse some of the most notable works by female authors that have graced our bookshelves in recent years:

 

 

First published in 1818, Frankenstein is not only the “most famous English horror novel” but also, by some critics’ reckoning, “the first genuine science fiction novel” (Clute & Nicholls, 1099). The circumstances of its composition are by now well known: 19-year old Mary was in Switzerland with Percy Shelley, Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori on that famous evening in 1816 when the discussion turned to one of Shelley’s favorite topics, the supernatural. Byron proposed that all members of the party write a romance or tale dealing with the subject. The resulting efforts were Polidori’s The Vampyre, Byron’s unfinished narrative about a vampire, and Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein, “the most famous English horror novel… a defining model of the Gothic mode of fiction, and… the first genuine science fiction novel, the first significant rendering of the relations between mankind and science through an image of mankind’s dual nature appropriate to an age of science” (Clute and Nicholls, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 1099).

At base, the novel is one of creative powers gone wrong-a subject of paramount concern to Mary Shelley, as her own mother had died as a result of Shelley’s birth, and the year before writing Frankenstein, she lost her own daughter, Clare.

 

 

Pride and Prejudice was written between October 1796 and August 1797 when Jane Austen was not yet twenty-one. After an early rejection by the publisher Cadell, who had not even read it, Austen’s novel was finally bought by Egerton in 1812 for £110. It was published in late January 1813 in a small edition of approximately 1500 copies and sold for 18 shillings in boards. Volume I of the first edition was printed by Roworth and Volumes II and III by Sidney, and their imprints appear both on the versos of the half titles and at the end of the text of each volume. In a letter to her sister Cassandra on 29 January 1813, Austen wrote of receiving her copy of the newly publishing novel (her “own darling child”), and while acknowledging its few errors, she expressed her feelings toward its heroine as such: “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”

 

 

Raised in the mid 19th-century in a small village in the countryside of Northern England, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë created what have come to be considered some of the greatest works of literature, despite the isolation and often devastating conditions that defined their short lives. Charlotte, the eldest sister, was the driving force behind the publication of the sisters’ works; a passion that all three had developed very early in life as a form of play in the isolation of their father’s parsonage. She found it difficult to find a publisher willing to make the commercial risk of publishing women’s writing and finally published the sisters’ first joint publication of poetry under the male pseudonyms of Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. The Poems of 1846 attracted little attention, but the following year Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey were published (after dozens of rejections) and received glowing critical acclaim, leading to their relative fame when they were finally able to prove to be the works’ true authors.

 

 

One of the earliest American novels that focuses on women’s issues without condescension, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics. The novel’s blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American modernist literature; it prefigures the works of American novelists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and echoes the works of contemporaries such as Edith Wharton and Henry James. It can also be considered among the first Southern works in a tradition that would culminate with the modern works of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Tennessee Williams.

 

 

First published in 1925 in a print run of only 2000 copies, Mrs. Dalloway remains on of Virginia Woolf‘s best known novels. “In Mrs. Dalloway Woolf breaks decisively with the fictional conventions of the realistic novel. The technique is almost orchestral, introducing and then interweaving the strains of the different characters’ thoughts, and finally engineering, through a subtle sequence of readjustments and realignments, a new and delicate harmony between them at the close of the book. Mrs. Dalloway thus initiated Woolf’s sequence of radical experiments with literary form, embodying a striking combination of fluid sympathy and secret resistance. Through the novel’s rapid transitions between apparently disconnected, but secretly related stories, Woolf was able to suggest the hazards of neatly pigeonholing human character according to social situation or gender” (Parker, 110-11).

 

 

English author Agatha Christie remains best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Christie also wrote the world’s longest-running play, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap, and six romances under the name Mary Westmacott. In 1971 she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her contribution to literature. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six rejections, but this changed when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot, was published in 1920.

 

 

During the Second World War she worked as a pharmacy assistant at University College Hospital, London, during the Blitz and acquired a good knowledge of poisons which featured in many of her subsequent novels. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 2 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works come third in the rankings of the world’s most-widely published books, behind only Shakespeare’s works and the Bible. According to Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author – having been translated into at least 103 languages. And Then There Were None is Christie’s best-selling novel, with 100 million sales to date, making it the world’s best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time.

 

 

Best known for her raw and vivid portrayal of the racial struggles that defined the American south of the early 20th century, African-American novelist Zora Neale Hurston’s work now holds a unique place in the canon of American literature, despite the fact that much of her work went unrecognized during her lifetime.

Hurston received criticism for Their Eyes Were Watching God from several leading Harlem Renaissance authors who denounced the work for propagating racial stereotypes, rather than participating in the movement’s mission to uplift and redefine Black identity. Richard Wright condemned her prose for being “… cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley… Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.” It was not until the 1970s that Hurston would achieve  a level of mainstream institutional support, particularly with the publication of Alice Walker’s essay, “Looking for Zora” in which she described how the Black community’s general rejection of Hurston was like “throwing away a genius.”

 

 

In addition to the rare titles featured above, our collection currently includes titles by many other notable women writers including George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Mitchell, Edith Wharton, Ayn Rand, Toni Morrison, and J.K. Rowling among others.