20 Inspirational Women Authors

It’s International Women’s Day on the 8th of March, and the entire month of March is Women’s History Month! There’s always a reason to celebrate women in literature, and no better time than right now. So here are our 20 inspirational women authors that you should all be reading right now.

1. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice, Emma
2. Maya Angelou – I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, And Still I Rise
3. Agatha Christie – Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None
4. Toni Morrison – Beloved, The Bluest Eye
5. Bernadine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other, Mr Loverman
6. Jojo Moyes – Me Before You, The Giver of Stars
7. The Brontë Sisters – Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
8. Malorie Blackman – Noughts & Crosses, Pig-Heart Boy
9. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale, The Edible Woman
10. Caitlin Moran – How To Be a Woman, How to Build a Girl
11. Beatrix Potter – The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
12. Malala Yousafzai – I Am Malala, We Are Displaced
13. Tayari Jones – An American Marriage, Silver Sparrow
14. Sally Rooney – Normal People, Conversations with Friends
15. Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) – Middlemarch, Silas Marner
16. Zadie Smith – Swing Time, White Teeth, On Beauty
17. Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall, The Mirror & the Light
18. Kate Pankhurst – Great Women Who… Series, Mariella Mystery Investigates… Series
19. Jacqueline Wilson (Hetty Feather, The Story of Tracy Beaker)
20. Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar, Ariel

Let’s celebrate all the brilliant women in writing not just today, but every day.

With so many fantastic women in literature, it has been a tough task to narrow our selection to just twenty! It would simply be a travesty not to mention a few more…

Celeste Ng, Jodi Picoult, Giovanna Fletcher, Virginia Woolf, Jeanette Winterson, Mary Shelley, Daphne Du Maurier, Alice Walker, Elizabeth Bowen, Anne Frank, Helen Oyeyemi, Katie Fforde, Philippa Gregory, Liane Moriarty, Angie Thomas, Louise Pentland, Zora Neale Hurston, Sophie Kinsella, Arundhati Roy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Paula Hawkins, Octavia E. Butler, Suzanne Collins, Bell Hooks, Victoria Hislop, Katherine Johnson, Louisa May Alcott, Kathryn Stockett, Gillian Flynn, Dawn French, Muriel Spark, Ann Cleeves, Diana Evans, Robin Stevens, Carrie Hope Fletcher, Marian Keyes, Dolly Alderton, Katherine Rundell, Leigh Bardugo.

Our lists of 20 inspirational women writers has focused heavily on fiction authors. However, you can explore a huge range of books from non-fiction to poetry in our Women’s History Month Books.

Want to explore women in poetry? Check out our list of top five influential women poets.
We look forward to seeing more brilliant writing from many inspirational ladies in the future. If you can’t find a new writer to fall in love with, or feel like you have read it all, why not try writing your own stories?

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What do you think of these 20 inspirational women authors? Who do you have on your list? Let us know in the comments below.