ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The 100 best books by women

The 100 best books by women, ranked by literary regard. Difficulty and reading-time estimates where measured.

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible works currently in the catalogue for this selection. Ranked by literary regard across ReadingRate's full catalogue, the best books by women open with Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji — arguably the first novel ever written. This list ranks the top 100, each with difficulty scores and reading-time estimates.

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible works currently in the catalogue for this selection. This is a computed ranking ordered by literary regard, with a consistent order for equal scores. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. Catalogue coverage and the historical canon both limit what this list can represent.

About 716 hours for 100 of 100 books with measured lengths. Estimates use a 250-word-per-minute baseline adjusted for each book's difficulty. At two hours a day, about 358 days for those books.

1–10

1. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988, difficulty 5.8/10, 6.9 hours)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813, difficulty 5.2/10, 13 hours)
3. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (1010, difficulty 6.3/10, 7.5 hours)
4. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929, difficulty 5.7/10, 2.6 hours)
5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818, difficulty 6.8/10, 6.3 hours)
6. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871, difficulty 5.4/10, 21 hours)
7. Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965, difficulty 7.6/10, 1.8 hours)
8. Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988, difficulty 8.8/10, 13 hours)
9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847, difficulty 7.3/10, 9.6 hours)
10. Requiem by Anna Akhmatova (1963, difficulty 7.1/10, 1.2 hours)

11–20

11. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927, difficulty 7.0/10, 5 hours)
12. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972, difficulty 5.8/10, 15 hours)
13. Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928, difficulty 4.5/10, 5.2 hours)
14. Notes on 'Camp' by Susan Sontag (2018, difficulty 6.2/10, 45 min)
15. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977, difficulty 6.8/10, 9.3 hours)
16. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor (1955, difficulty 4.2/10, 2.8 hours)
17. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949, difficulty 5.8/10, 21 hours)
18. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, difficulty 5.9/10, 6.5 hours)
19. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1983, difficulty 5.2/10, 5.5 hours)
20. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969, difficulty 6.7/10, 6.4 hours)

21–30

21. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler (1989, difficulty 5.8/10, 15 hours)
22. Emma by Jane Austen (1815, difficulty 5.6/10, 6.4 hours)
23. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (1811, difficulty 5.3/10, 7.9 hours)
24. Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro (1990, difficulty 7.2/10, 8.2 hours)
25. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf by Virginia Woolf (1966, difficulty 5.4/10, 5.2 hours)
26. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847, difficulty 5.4/10, 11 hours)
27. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection by Julia Kristeva (1980, difficulty 8.1/10, 6.5 hours)
28. Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817, difficulty 5.4/10, 5.8 hours)
29. This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga (1981, difficulty 6.0/10, 18 hours)
30. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009, difficulty 6.0/10, 10 hours)

31–40

31. The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931, difficulty 7.5/10, 6.9 hours)
32. The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert (1979, difficulty 6.3/10, 17 hours)
33. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Lewalski (1979, difficulty 6.3/10, 8.7 hours)
34. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, difficulty 6.3/10, 4.5 hours)
35. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962, difficulty 4.0/10, 6.4 hours)
36. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf (1942, difficulty 7.6/10, 5.5 hours)
37. Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok (1978, difficulty 4.3/10, 5.2 hours)
38. Poem Without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova (1960, difficulty 8.1/10, 1.4 hours)
39. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963, difficulty 4.7/10, 9.1 hours)
40. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970, difficulty 5.9/10, 3.7 hours)

41–50

41. The Art of Memory by Frances Yates (1966, difficulty 6.9/10, 13 hours)
42. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963, difficulty 6.4/10, 5.4 hours)
43. Paradise by Toni Morrison (1999, difficulty 6.5/10, 8.5 hours)
44. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976, difficulty 4.6/10, 4.6 hours)
45. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1980, difficulty 6.5/10, 5.8 hours)
46. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983, difficulty 4.9/10, 4.6 hours)
47. Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf (1941, difficulty 5.8/10, 4.5 hours)
48. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development by Elizabeth Abel (1983, difficulty 6.6/10, 6.7 hours)
49. Happening by Annie Ernaux (2000, difficulty 6.6/10, 1.5 hours)
50. The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel (2020, difficulty 5.1/10, 21 hours)

51–60

51. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature by Martha Nussbaum (1990, difficulty 6.5/10, 10 hours)
52. The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf (1925, difficulty 5.1/10, 5 hours)
53. Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop (1976, difficulty 7.8/10, 26 min)
54. A Literature of Their Own by Elaine Showalter (1977, difficulty 6.0/10, 7.1 hours)
55. Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (1947, difficulty 7.5/10, 5.2 hours)
56. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979, difficulty 6.3/10, 7.9 hours)
57. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry (1985, difficulty 7.0/10, 15 hours)
58. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966, difficulty 6.4/10, 3.6 hours)
59. The Selected Works of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde (2020, difficulty 5.5/10, 7 hours)
60. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962, difficulty 7.1/10, 19 hours)

61–70

61. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin (1969, difficulty 5.7/10, 6.9 hours)
62. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968, difficulty 4.7/10, 4.1 hours)
63. The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova (1999, difficulty 7.1/10, 9.3 hours)
64. The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir (1947, difficulty 5.8/10, 3.2 hours)
65. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldua (1987, difficulty 4.0/10, 2.7 hours)
66. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999, difficulty 7.8/10, 15 hours)
67. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814, difficulty 5.4/10, 11 hours)
68. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin (1973, difficulty 6.7/10, 14 min)
69. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation by Margaret Mead (2001, difficulty 4.9/10, 4.4 hours)
70. Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (1997, difficulty 5.6/10, 5.9 hours)

71–80

71. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852, difficulty 4.3/10, 10 hours)
72. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe by Lisa Jardine (1986, difficulty 6.3/10, 7.2 hours)
73. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952, difficulty 4.4/10, 3.5 hours)
74. Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (1922, difficulty 7.5/10, 4.9 hours)
75. The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015, difficulty 8.0/10, 12 hours)
76. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1961, difficulty 3.9/10, 8.3 hours)
77. Waiting for God by Simone Weil (1950, difficulty 6.5/10, 6.6 hours)
78. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959, difficulty 5.6/10, 4.5 hours)
79. Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva by Marina Tsvetaeva (1979, difficulty 5.2/10, 1.7 hours)
80. Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro (1968, difficulty 5.2/10, 5.1 hours)

81–90

81. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984, difficulty 5.7/10, 4.6 hours)
82. The Laugh of the Medusa by Hélène Cixous (1975, difficulty 7.7/10, 1.1 hours)
83. The White Album by Joan Didion (1979, difficulty 5.1/10, 3.9 hours)
84. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (2008, difficulty 7.7/10, 9.8 hours)
85. Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853, difficulty 5.8/10, 13 hours)
86. The Time of the Doves by Mercè Rodoreda (1962, difficulty 3.3/10, 3 hours)
87. Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich (1973, difficulty 7.2/10, 36 min)
88. Women, Race & Class by Angela Davis (1981, difficulty 4.8/10, 4.8 hours)
89. Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man by Barbara Reynolds (2006, difficulty 5.7/10, 13 hours)
90. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative by Wendy B. Faris (2004, difficulty 6.5/10, 8.9 hours)

91–100

91. Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska by Wisława Szymborska (1998, difficulty 4.2/10, 2.2 hours)
92. Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wisława Szymborska (2015, difficulty 5.8/10, 3.7 hours)
93. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1937, difficulty 2.9/10, 5.5 hours)
94. Runaway by Alice Munro (2004, difficulty 4.5/10, 5.5 hours)
95. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison (1992, difficulty 5.2/10, 1.6 hours)
96. The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (1002, difficulty 6.5/10, 9.6 hours)
97. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940, difficulty 5.4/10, 8.3 hours)
98. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974, difficulty 6.1/10, 6.5 hours)
99. Poems New and Collected by Wisława Szymborska (1998, difficulty 5.8/10, 2.5 hours)
100. I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl (1999, difficulty 4.6/10, 4.4 hours)