There is no doubt that women have suffered from important social restrictions throughout history. Some of them could overcome and break down these restrictions via willpower, determination, ingenuity, creativity and hard work in order to create a better future for themselves. Some of the most powerful and prominent authors, novelists, and poets were women.
The most famous women writers of history
1. Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Jane Austen is one of the most famous and admirable writers of the 18th century. She is internationally recognized for her six main novels. Austen as an English author was interested in stories that put emphasis on women’s independence in marriage or security and independence of women in economic affairs. Jane Austen was one of the pioneer female writers to write works that dealt with and talked about the British landed nobility.
2. Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851)
Mary Shelley who is renowned as one of the famous writers of Gothic fiction is one of the best and most famous women writers in history. She was also a famous editor who worked mainly on the works of her husband. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft was a feminist activist and her father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher. Shelley was raised mainly by her father after her mother died early. She benefited from powerful yet informal education. She married very soon and decided to dedicate most of her time to working on her husbands’ works while simultaneously following fiction writing.
3.Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)
Emily Bronte, the sister of famous female author Charlotte Bronte, was one of the most famous writers of the Victorian age who is primarily admired and remembered for her memorable novel, Wuthering Heights which is also one of the best novels ever written in history of English literature. Bronte was also a creative poet who published her works under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. She was always admired for her exceptional intercultural ability and this admiration and accolades continue even today. She also wrote poems in cooperation with her sisters.
4.Charlotte Bronte (1816 – 1855)
Charlotte Bronte, one of the best and most famous female writers of the Victorian age, is well-known for her novels, including Jane Eyre (1847). She had two sisters who were younger than her, and when their attempt to start a school did not succeed, she made her decision to follow her enthusiasm and became a famous writer.
Bronte not only was a very famous and competent writer, but she was also a very creative and brave poet since she became one of the first writers to test many different poetic forms, like the extended narrative and dramatic monologue which created the distinctive motifs of Victorian literature.
5.Louisa May Alcott (1832 – 1888)
Although she is most famous as the writer of Little Women, the contribution that this American novelist, poet, and short story writer Louisa May Alcott made to literature is exceptional. Alcott spent a lot of time solving her family’s financial problems, exactly like the four sisters whom she portrayed in her famous novel, while also trying to continue her career as a writer. Little Women, was her first important literary success after she started her cooperation with the Atlantic Monthly in 1860.
6.Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)
Virginia Woolf was one of the most famous English authors of the early 20th century. Woolf, who is considered one of the most modernist authors of the century, experimented and added different literary motifs to our current innovative writing language while concurrently fighting the social inequities which women were suffering in the early 1900s. For example, Woolf is famous to be one of the first authors who used the stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction, especially in one of her most famous works, A Room of One’s Own.
7.Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976)
Dame Agatha Christie is known as the best-selling fiction writer in all of history. She is famous for creating the fictional inspectors Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and she also wrote The Mousetrap, the play which enjoyed the longest performance in the West End. She was reared in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, where she died at the age of 85.
8.Harper Lee (1926 – 2016)
Harper Lee is an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She won recognition and renown for her book “To Kill a Mockingbird”. Her novel was a great success and brought her Prize in 1961 and she started there her career as a famous author. It was Lee’s raising in Monroeville, Alabama, that was the source of inspiration for the book.
9.Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019)
Toni Morrison was an American novelist and editor who was born and reared in Lorain. She became a famous writer due to her ability to depict the Black American issues in her works with such genuineness. Her characters regularly try to find themselves and their cultural identities in an unfair society. She is a very competent author who strengthens her stories by making use of poetic style and regularly fanciful style of writing. Morrison was a very successful author and was appreciated for her achievements with various honors and prizes.
10.Margaret Atwood (1939)
The Handmaid’s Tale, which was penned by Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood in 1985, portrays a very bad and unfair society. This is a very successful novel that experienced amazing successes such as an exceptional TV series adaptation of this novel. As an author, Atwood focused on many various subjects that have been dealt with during previous historical periods yet are still applicable now, like gender and identity, religion, climate crisis, and language usage. And the creative way in which she mixes these matters with a literary style causes her to be one of the best female authors in history.
