Let's face it - women have been shaping the world for centuries yet we just don't receive the same recognition as our male counterparts. For literature fans though, there has never been a drought of strong female characters from classic texts to contemporary.
Although literature has shifted over the years, some of these novels can be considered the pioneers of building strong female characters and projecting them to the world. Gone are the days where a woman's responsibilities were to simply submit, marry, carry children and keep a good home. Avid readers will already know all the classics off by heart, yet there may still be some of you hoping to hear more about the literary heroines that are out there waiting to be discovered.
A good book is one you just can't put down, but if we learn something along the way then we are all the better for it. Here are twenty powerful novels that can potentially change the way you think and how you live.
20 The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
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The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction from Canadian author Margaret Atwood that explores social control, sexuality and identity. Set in the future where all women have lost their rights, "The Handmaids" are a group of fertile women used by rich couples to become baby-making machines. In this dystopian society, the role of a Handmaid is considered to be one of the highest honour and a sterile woman is considered a "non-person".
The novel was banned from classrooms due to its content including graphic sex, despite it's contribution to ongoing debates surrounding feminist issues.
19 Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
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Speak, the first novel by author Laurie Halse Anderson, is one of the more stand out young adult novels. This story details the life of a teenage girl, Melinda Salindo, who in the aftermath of being sexually assaulted feels as if she is entirely alone. On her first day as a high school freshman, she feels isolated when other students harass her and even those she considers her best friends abandon her.
Many women had a traumatic experience throughout our turbulent school years, Anderson uses her gift as a writer to help us understand the raw emotions all teenage girls feel. Even though this novel is marked as suitable for young adults - all ages will understand the powerful message from this great read.
18 The Awakening by Kate Chopin
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The Awakening by Kate Chopin was first published in 1899. It was considered groundbreaking as it tells the story of a New Orleans mother and wife who begins to question her own role in society. In one paragraph her existence is described as, "There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.”
Stuck in a loveless marriage at a time when divorce was not an option, she grows an attraction to another man which was considered quite the scandal amongst 19th century readers. This is an unmissable novel for feminists and one part of the awakening is how thankful we can all be in just how far we have come.
17 The Round House by Louise Erdich
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A very difficult yet powerful read is The Round House by Louise Erdich. This powerhouse of a novel follows a teenage boy named Joe Coutts who lives on a Native American reserve. After his own mother is sexually attacked, Joe and his friends head to the round house hunting for any evidence the police had missed which could help them solve who was responsible for the brutal attack on his mother.
Released in 2012, Erdich's fourteenth novel explores issues surrounding sexual violence, families and communities, this is a deep look at the sexual repression of native women. In 2015 it appeared in The Oyster Review's list of "100 Best Books of the Decade So Far" and continues to be named as a groundbreaking read all women must experience.
16 An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
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An Untamed State is the first novel from Roxane Gay which won worldwide critical praise for it's exploration of social class, wealth and violence. This psychological thriller follows the life of the young, wealthy Haitan-American Mireille Duval Jameson after she is kidnapped and held for ransom at her father's multi-acre estate in Port Au Prince in front of her own husband and child.
Gay sheds light on the sexual and emotional violence pushed onto women. Although Mireille’s story is one that will give you nightmares in the night, each page is just as gripping as the next and surprisingly hopeful throughout.
15 The Golden Notebook by Dorris Lessing
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When Dorris Lessing first published her iconic 1962 novel The Golden Notebook she was branded a "man-hater". What is now known as the "feminist Bible" has since been chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. The book explores the liberation of women, war and communism.
Protagonist Anna Wulf keeps four different notebooks which all serve a very different purpose. After she records her life in the books, she then tries to tie them all together into the fifth golden notebook. Lessing's work is a triumph and a great commentary on women's conflict of work, sex, love, maternity and politics.
14 The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
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Rachel Kushner's fearless novel The Flamethrowers is a story set in 1977 about a young filmmaker and motorcycle fanatic named Reno. After travelling to New York to help explore her talents further, her journey witnesses her involvement with other dreamers and artists. Reno indulges in affairs, feels the burn of betrayal and discovers more about herself than she ever knew.
Kushner received an abundance of praise for her work. The New Yorker's James Wood claimed the book was "scintillatingly alive" and that it "(succeeded) because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."
13 I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou
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Maya Angelou is one of the most praised American authors. Also a poet and a civil rights activist, she has published seven autobiographies about her life and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, released in 1969, details her life up to the age of seventeen. Her memoir has been heralded a masterpiece as it is an honest account of growing up poor in the South, experiencing sexual abuse and teenage pregnancy.
Despite all her disadvantages Angelou became a breakthrough success and was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1994, the National Medal of Artsin 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She was also awarded over fifty honorary degrees. Sadly she passed away due to bad health in 2014.
12 Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
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Madam Bovary was first translated into English in 1886. Author Gustave Flaubert tells the story of a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who indulged in affairs and lives vicariously beyond her own means so she can avoid facing up to the emptiness of her life. In the novel it's describing beautifully as, "At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon."
One of the morals the novel tries to convey is that happiness is primarily a decision although often we believe it is our situation that defines it. A must read for any woman who feels as if she is always chasing true happiness.
11 Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
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Released in 1973, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong introduces us to Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing a 29-year-old poet who publishes erotic fiction. Isadora experiences an overwhelming amount of attention through her work, often in the form of quite alarming fan letters.
It was the first time the idea of "no-strings sex" had been explored so brazenly by a female writer. Jong writes, "The zipless f**k is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not 'taking' and the woman is not 'giving'. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless f**k is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one." The novel has since sold over 20 million copies worldwide.
10 Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
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Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a real coming-of-age story by Jeanette Winterson. The story details what it's like growing up as a young lesbian in a small community. It addresses very important themes such as youth culture, religious views, turbulent families and same sex relationships. In the book, protagonist Jeanette and her gay partner are subjected to exorcisms from the church.
Winterson explained the book was semi-autobiographical, based on her own life in Lancashire in Britain which she said infuriated her mother after it's publication.
9 Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author most famous for her feminist speech entitled, "We should all be feminists". Recorded originally as part of a TED talk, Beyonce used part of her speech for her for song "***Flawless" which read, "We teach girls you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful otherwise, you will threaten the man."
Alongside running her own successful blog about racism in America, Adichie also Americanah in 2013. The story details the life of Ifemelu who is a Nigerian woman living in the United States. After her education at Princeton ends, she returns to her home of Nigeria where she meets her first love again. The book explores issues of love, identity and race.
8 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
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by Louisa May Alcott is considered a classic and you can probably remember it appearing often on your reading list at school. It explores the pressure young girls are put through with relationships, work, domesticity and death.
Sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March let us witness their journey into womanhood and how we are expected to keep up with the "perfect woman" ideal all the time. When the novel was published, many young women only had marriage as their life goal and author Alcott would receive many fan letters asking who the little women finally wed.
7 The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
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Your eyes will hurt from holding back the tears after reading The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. Lisel Meminger is nine-years-old when she is sent to live with her working-class foster parents in Germany. Her journey begins set on the tough background of the World War II, as she describes, "I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate." She turns to books for escapism and begins to feed her hunger by stealing them.
The Book Thief went on to win six literature awards including the Commonwealth Writer's Prize and was made into a film released in 2013.
6 Brick Lane by Monica Ali
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We live a life where we can feel privileged to have our freedom from a young age. We can hang out with our friends, date guys we like and discover what he want to really do with our lives when we grow up. In Brick Lane there we are presented with a chilling contrast, Nazneen is an 18-yearold Bangladeshi teenager who is adapting to her new surroundings after moving to London and marrying a man many years her senior. She can speak just two things in english - "sorry" and "thank you".
Monica Ali was selected as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" in 2003 before her book was even published after she was judged purely on the manuscript. Brick Lane was also shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and then adapted as a movie in 2007.
5 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
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Alice Walker's The Colour Purple is one of the most important novels you will ever read. Celie is fourteen-years-old, African-American, uneducated and living in southern America during the 1930s. Her life story is one that is plagued with so much sexual violence and prejudice that it was once censored by libraries.
Celie's story is heartbreaking yet she remains hopeful explaining, "I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love." The Colour Purple was adapted for the screen by Steven Spielberg and he cast Whoopi Goldberg in the lead role.
4 Beloved by Toni Morrison
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Based on the real-life story of Margaret Gunner who escaped slavery in the late 1880's, Beloved is a novel set in Kentucky that opens discussion surrounding women's rights and our freedom of choice. Author Toni Morrison tells the story of how Gunner murdered her own two-year-old daughter with a butcher's knife so she wouldn't have to live a life of slavery.
Her actions were approved by antislavery activist Lucy Stone who claimed Gunner had acted within her own rights. She explained, “Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?” This is one novel that will sit in your heart forever.
3 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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Penned by the talented Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre tells the story a young girl discovering womanhood at a time when women had quite a low social standing. Throughout the novel, Jane comes across many men who attempt to overpower her and she has since been described as the very first feminist icon by many who admire how she handled each situation.
Inspired by her own life, Charlotte Bronte describes the real pain of tuberculosis, which is how she lost her two sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, in real-life. In 1848, the book was reviewed by Elizabeth Rigby in The Quarterly Review, she claimed the novel was "anti-Christian" and that it "violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered rebellion at home". Despite early criticisms the novel is considered a triumph even in modern day.
2 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
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The Bell Jar is a semi-autobiographical novel by Sylvia Plath first published in 1963. We are introduced to bright, young journalist Esther Greenwood who's talent in the writing field lands her a job in New York City with a prominent magazine. Despite having the world at her feet, she battles depression and attempts suicide twice.
A month after Plath's novel was published, she committed suicide herself after using the kitchen oven to poison herself with carbon monoxide. Aged just 30-years-old, she had struggled with clinical depression for many years and The Bell Jar would be her final work.
1 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Frieden
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In 1963, author Betty Frieden gave to the world The Feminine Mystique which was inspired from a survey she created in real-life after asking her former classmates questions about their life fifteen years after school. Her survey revealed that everyone was miserable - and although this is no shock to us now - women wanted more than to just be a housewife or a mother.
The Feminine Mystique then prompted the "second wave of feminism" after selling more than three million copies. Friedman had a strong voice which was ahead of it's time, she writes, "…women who ‘adjust’ as housewives, who grow up wanting to be ‘just a housewife,’ are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps…they ate suffering a slow death of mind and spirit”. Not only is her book liberating it changed the way women think and shaped our future into what it is today.
Sources: goodreads.com, nytimes.com
