Women Writing Women
A century of women writers rendering female experience with precision and ferocity, 1811–1920. Each of these novels was, in its time, either scandalous or groundbreaking — several were both. Listen free on HearCandy.
Sense and Sensibility
Austen’s first published novel. Two sisters navigate love, money, and society with wildly different emotional styles — one all feeling, one all reason. Brilliantly funny.
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Pride and Prejudice
The novel that invented the idea that love and intelligence are compatible. Austen’s most beloved work has never stopped being the standard against which romantic novels are judged.
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Jane Eyre
A plain, poor governess who refuses to be diminished. Brontë created the first truly independent female protagonist in English fiction — a woman who walks away from a man she loves because she won’t compromise herself.
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Wuthering Heights
The wildest love story in the English canon. Heathcliff and Cathy’s obsession burns through two generations, consuming everything in its path.
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The Mill on the Floss
Maggie Tulliver is too brilliant for the provincial world that constrains her. Eliot’s most personal novel is about the cost women pay for having minds too large for their circumstances.
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Middlemarch
Often called the greatest novel in the English language. Eliot renders an entire provincial world with such precision that every character feels absolutely real.
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The Story of an African Farm
The first feminist novel from Africa (1883). A woman refusing marriage, questioning God, dying on her own terms — scandalous for its era and still startling today.
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The Awakening
Edna Pontellier wakes up. Chopin’s 1899 novel was so controversial it ended her career — a married woman who discovers she wants more than what society allows her.
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The House of Mirth
Lily Bart is too smart and too poor to survive New York society. Wharton watches a brilliant woman destroyed by a world that has no place for her.
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The Age of Innocence
Old New York, 1870s. A man trapped between duty and desire — and the crushing weight of a society that will not permit him to choose. Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize winner.
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Herland
A country with no men, no war, no poverty — and three explorers who can’t believe it. Gilman’s 1915 utopian satire is wryly funny and devastatingly pointed.
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