Public domain image originally taken by George Charles Beresford.
When Open Culture recently published Jorge Luis Borges’ self-compiled list of 74 ‘great works of literature’, commissioned by Argentine publisher Hyspamerica, I, along with many others, saw one glaring issue in the otherwise fantastically diverse list: it included no works by female writers.
Whether intentional or not, the fact that women are excluded from Borges’ noteworthies (and in 1985, no less) means that a vast number of historically and culturally significant books and writings have been overlooked. While this ought not to discredit the works listed in any way, after witnessing the immense popularity of Borges’ list I certainly felt that for his selection to be relevant today it needed to be accompanied by a list of works which had been overlooked due to the gender of their respective authors.
I decided to put a suggestion to a group of international women writers, artists and curators, and we compiled our own list of 74 ‘great works of literature’ — one just as varied, loose and substantial as that of Borges, but made up solely of writers identifying as women or non-gender-binary. Over two days we amassed many suggestions, which I’ve now curated to form the list below. It’s not intended to invalidate the original, but rather to serve as an accompaniment to highlight and encourage a dialogue on gender imbalances in creative and intellectual realms, as well as to provide a balance by actively ‘equalising’ that of Jorge Luis Borges.
- Agatha Christie – The Mousetrap
- Albertine Sarrazin – L’Astragale
- Alice Walker – The Color Purple
- Anaïs Nin – Little Birds
- Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus
- Angela Davis – Are Prisons Obselete?
- Anita Desai – Clear Light of Day
- Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red
- Anne Frank – The Diary of a Young Girl
- Anne Sexton – Live or Die
- Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things
- Banana Yoshimoto – Kitchen
- bell hooks – Ain’t I a Woman?
- Beryl Bainbridge – Master Georgie
- Beryl Markham – West with the Night
- Buchi Emecheta – The Joys of Motherhood
- Carson McCullers – The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
- Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
- Charlotte Roche – Feuchtgebiete
- Chris Kraus – I Love Dick
- Colette – Chéri
- Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca
- Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
- Edith Wharton – Age of Innocence
- Eileen Myles – Inferno
- Elfriede Jelinek – Women as Lovers
- Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
- Flannery O’Connor – Complete Stories
- Françoise Sagan – Bonjour Tristesse
- George Eliot – Silas Marner
- Gertrude Stein – The Making of Americans
- Gwendolyn Brooks – To Disembark
- Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition
- Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
- Hillary Mantel – Wolf Hall
- Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea
- James Tiptree Jr. – Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
- Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea
- Jhumpa Lahiri – Interpreter of Maladies
- Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem
- Joyce Carol Oats – A Bloodsmoore Romance
- Jung Chang – Wild Swans
- Kate Zambreno – Heroines
- Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School
- Leonora Carrington – The Hearing Trumpet
- Leslie Feinberg – Stone Butch Blues
- Lorrie Moore – Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
- Louise Erdrich – The Beet Queen
- Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
- Marguerite Duras – Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein
- Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
- Mary Wollstonecraft – A Vindication of the Rights of Women
- Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
- Michelle Cliff – Abeng
- Miranda July – No One Belongs Here More Than You
- Monique Wittig – Les Guérillères
- Murasaki Shikibu – Genji Monogatari
- Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat
- Octavia Butler – Kindred
- Rachel Carson – Silent Spring
- Roxane Gay – An Untamed State
- Sappho – Fragments
- Sara Stridsberg – Darling River
- Sei Shōnagon – The Pillow Book
- Simone Weil – Gravity and Grace
- Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
- Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – Dictée
- Toni Morrison – Beloved
- Tove Jansson – Mumintroll series
- Tsitsi Dangarembga – Nervous Conditions
- Ursula K Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness
- Virginia Woolf – The Waves
- Willa Cather – The Song of the Lark
- Zadie Smith – On Beauty
Lulu Nunn is a London-based artist, writer, curator and editor of HOAX, an international journal publishing creative work incorporating text. You can follow her at @lulu_nunn and HOAX at @hoaxpublication.
Wonderful. Thank you for this marvelous list!
I agree with many of the authors, but I’m puzzled by some of the works chosen. Case in point: Octavia Butler? yes! “Kindred,” not “Parable of the Sower”? say more, please.
Alice Munro???
great – not necessarily ‘greatest’; it’s not intended as a competition.
Marguerite YOURCENAR – Les Mémoires d’Hadrien
Valerie SOLANAS – SCUM Manifesto
Yes, where is Alice Munro? And why not Middlemarch? Not that Silas Marner isn’t a good book, but… ?
Where are the Latin American writers like Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, Isabel Allende, etc.? Biases go all different ways.
ALICE MUNRO and ELSA MORANTE!!!
agatha christie ? i went no further. your list instantly lost all credibility.
she has no cultural artistical or intellectual value. it’s not enough to be a woman, in spite of what you might think, to be talented. geez. you feminists drive me nuts. and i’m a woman. a very irate one, at that.
Interesting list, but would have been nice to know the names of those who helped you compile it.
No Jane Austen?
Faltarian los diarios de Emma Goldman, por poner un ejemplo.
No Isabel Allende? No Jane Austen? Barbara Kingsolver? Important voices missing. Make room by dropping Agatha Christie.
As a feminist, I sincerely thank you for bringing this issue to the public’s attention. It should be mentioned that Borges himself translated Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of one’s Own” and “Orlando” into Spanish early on in the 1930s. These translations were of utmost importance in the development of the feminist movement in Latin America, and informed the work of writers such as Rosario Castellanos, Rosario Ferré and Isabel Allende –conspicuously absent from this list. Perhaps Latin American women writers should have “A List of Their Own.”
putting feuchtgebiete on one list with anything written by toni morrison is like… i don’t even know. i can’t believe it.
My missing personal favs:
de Beauvoir, Simone – Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée
Tristán, Flora – Peregrinaciones de una paria
Sand, George (Aurore Dupin)- Consuelo
Riesco, Laura – Ximena de dos caminos
Here’s some that I would add:
Amelie Nothomb – Loving Sabotage
Yoko Ogawa – Revenge
Marguerite Yourcenar – The Abyss
Goliarda Sapienza – The Art of Joy
Eileen Chang – Love in a Fallen City
Dorothy B. Hughes – In A Lonely Place
Eudora Welty – The Robber Bridegroom
Dulce Maria Loynaz – Woman in her Garden
Ursula K. Leguin – The Earthsea Quartet
Marina Tsvetaeva – Art in the Light of Conscience
Clarice Lispector – The Hour of the Star
Nomi Prins – All the Presidents’ Bankers
Ruth Benedict – Patterns of Culture
Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Freya Stark – Perseus in the Wind
Marguerite Duras – The Sailor from Gibraltar
Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend
Emma Goldman – Anarchism and Other Essays
Sylvie Germain – The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague
Cynthia Ozick – The Puttermesser Papers
Isabelle Eberhardt – The Oblivion Seekers
Wislawa Szymborska – Poems: New and Collected
France Stonor Saunders – Who Paid the Piper?
Tatyana Tolstaya – White Walls: Collected Stories
Olivia Manning – The Balkan Trilogy
Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Irene Nemirovsky – Suite Francaise
Shirley Jackson – We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Joan Mellen – Farewell to Justice
Mary Renault – The King Must Die
Joan Didion – We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live
Cheri Seymour – The Last Circle
Djuna Barnes – Nightwood
Anna Akhmatova – The Complete Poems Of Anna Akhmatova
Mary Midgely – Science and Poetry
Irmtraud Morgner – The Life and Adventures of Trobadora Beatrice as Chronicled by Her Minstrel Laura
Gabriela Mistral – Madwomen
Patricia Highsmith – The Talented Mr. Ripley
Susan Sontag – Regarding the Pain of Others
We need another list: great works of literature by female Canadian writers – I can’t believe Alice Munro is not included.
Elsa Triolet – Le cheval blanc.
Edwige Danticat – The Farming of Bones.
Sue Monk Kidd – The Mermaid Chair
I am not at all disappointed that the list seems incomplete. I love that names are coming out that were not there. Thank you, JBT. Why don’t we all just continue the list? It’s wonderful.
Also, can we do an accompanying list of great modern works of literary NONFICTIOn by women?
I agree with Rafaelle R – wonderful to have started the conversation – and it’s great to have all the ‘extra’ lists and ideas. Many thanks.
How embarrassing to misspell both the writer AND her work. I’ve never cared anything for her or her writing–which makes her the female John Updike in my book. But at least I know how to spell her name and her title: A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates.
[i know this will sound like just another whine – nevertheless, it can’t be helped:]
many, many, extremely welcome -and loved- authors and works – but such a list seems positively odd without any jane austen, and any marguerite yourcenar…
Thank you , this is a great list .
Like others I miss Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar , Anna Akhmatova and Mariama Ba : une si longue lettre , such a long letter . She is African .
I agree!! Must have Alice Munro.
For those of you who think this is a list of fiction titles,this includes fiction, poetry and non-fiction. And I think it’s great that this list includes Agatha Christie as well as Anne Carson. There are others, however, that I think are flavors of the month, plus one old timer who with a lack of rhytm who churns out a novel a year with language so stilted that I develop migraines. For the most part, however, I think it’s a fine list that could be enhanced by the addition of Adichie and her short story collection.
Chiminanda Adichie, Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, Isabel Allende, Janisse Ray, Bailey White, Sue Monk Kidd, Winona LaDuke, Fannie Flagg, Harriette Arnow, Geraldine Brooks, Barbara Ehrenreich, Billie Letts, Kathryn Stockett, Leslie Marmon Silko, Haven Kimmel, Emma Donoghue, Anne Tyler, Ann Lamott, Madeleine L’Engle, Azar Nafisi, Jane Hamilton, Lee Smith, Kay Redfield Jamison, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth George Speare, Mary Karr, Lisa Genova, more….
This list is a great beginning and I’ve really enjoyed the additional recommendations in the comments. However, perhaps there is a deeper (and even more recent) issue here than Borges’ failure to include writers who are women on his list. Of the fifteen famous people whose lists of favourite books are included on the Open Culture home page, thirteen are men. There is one woman (Marilyn Monroe) and this list, compiled by Lula Nunn and an otherwise anonymous collective of ‘female creatives’. The list of Great Lectures and Great Recordings fares little better.
OpenCulture, you are wonderful, but surely there are more Book Lists and works by women that could be linked to on your front page? For instance, as a counterpart to David Bowie, what about Patti Smith’s list of favourites? This seems to be readily available on the internet, and would make a good start.
Sarah, that was my first thought, also.
And yes, do add to the list, that’s why we have them – for discussion and enrichment.
And, as the whole website shows a bias, please everyone, don’t limit your suggestions to just this page.
I would include Jetta Carlton’s The Moonflower Vine. Also, perhaps something by E.M. Forster?
Anna Kavan & Djuna Barnes
Where’s MFK Fisher? She even wrote “How to Cook a Wolf” in something like a month!
In 1963, W. H. Auden called her “America’s greatest writer.” And he didn’t say: “greatest food writer” or “greatest woman writer” – just, greatest writer.
As one of her biographers noted, she used food as a lens and milieu to consider and talk about people, life, death…
Dee Brown, who died in 2002, was a man
I would invite your further comment on how GK Chesterton’s Father Brown (from Borges’ list) over Christie’s stable of amateur and professional detectives are more deserving of the title of cultural, intellectual and artistic value? Would you also dismiss Borges on the basis of his choice of detective fiction as being a genre of influence?
Agatha Christie as one of the most influential members of the golden age of detective fiction is deserving of a place on this list. It does depend on how one defines intellectual, cultural and artistic value – unfortunately all very subjective things and extremely difficult to quantify.
Humans are fascinated by mysteries – they are part of the basic motivations for scientific inquiry and paradoxically also form one of the basic arguments which justify faith over reason. Part of the appeal of the detective genre may be its stubborn insistence on there being a neat explanation which makes sense of a chaotic universe – an idea famously subverted by Umberto Eco in “The Name of the Rose”. Whatever the reasons, even Borges has acknowledged that detectives are firmly embedded in human culture and though Christie’s writing is at times a little staid, she is definitely deserving of a place here.
My main concern is more that there are few, if any, Australian female authors on this list – even in their own country they have been marginalised but their voices are as powerful as any other – Louisa Lawson, Jessie Couvreur, Barbara Baynton, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Eve Langley, Kate Grenville, Ethel Florence (Henry Handel) Richardson, Jeannie Gunn, Stella Mary Sarah Miles Franklin, Kathy Lette (Puberty Blues), Melina Marchetta (Looking for Alibrandi), Thea Astley, Anne Summers and dare I add Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)?
I agree! Where’s Clarice Lispector?
I would say a very poor choice. It is very anglocentric in a first place. Second, there are no some of greatest writers of all time, male or female, Ostin, Yoursenar, Szymborska,Sontag,Sor Juana della Cruz,Ahmatova, Tsvetaeva, Munro, etc. On the other hand, you have some totally literary unimportant writers such as Agatha Christie. But probably most shocking is your choice not to include probably the greatest female artist of all time, Emily Dickinson?!
Open Culture didn’t say it was a definitive list you schmucks! All such lists are bound to be subjective – just as your suggestions are subjective! Use it as it is meant to be used – as a starting point!
I have read Borges’ complete works and there is a lot of admiration for female writers but not because they are women but they had written enjoyable books.
His intention to do the list (thought to span one hundred authors) was not diversity but to share the books that mattered for him with the distance of lived years, not in the name of “diversity” as the author of this list shows.
Applying the same (erroneous) criteria I could say I, along with many others, that this list by Lulu Nuck saw one glaring issue in the otherwise fantastically diverse list: it included no works by male writers.
Interesting to see that a list like this can provoke so many people! I think it’s good to be critical but also to realise that a list like this can (almost) never be complete nor static. Thus it is nice to see all the other names being dropped as a proof a list like this would differ for everyone and that it makes me a bit more critical when choosing a book (concerning picking up books by authors from countries I’ve never read a book from).
I actually wish I’d have a strong opinion on this but I haven’t, partly because I haven’t read all of these books. I’m far from that. I do hope that Ali Smith makes many lists one day, or does already.
And I’m going to do my best to read more books by female authors – and males alike.
E. M. Forster is a man.
i thought about solanas too :)
but really? Charlotte Roche is on the list, but not modern classics like George Sand, Bettina von Arnim, Else Lasker-Schüler, Mascha Kaleko, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and Assia Djebar. Also current writers like Dorota Maslowska, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Yasmina Reza and Mian Mian are missing (although i’d admit that they’re not canonical). What’s the artistic criterion for the curation?
but really? Charlotte Roche is on the list, but not modern classics like George Sand, Bettina von Arnim, Else Lasker-Schüler, Mascha Kaleko, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and Assia Djebar. Also great current writers like Dorota Maslowska, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Yasmina Reza and Mian Mian are missing (although i’d admit that they’re not canonical). And when you include political writers like Arendt what about Olympe de Gouges (probably the first feminist). And all marxists are missing: Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai. why? what’s the artistic criterion for the selection?
but really? Charlotte Roche is on the list, but not modern classics like George Sand, Bettina von Arnim, Else Lasker-Schüler, Mascha Kaleko, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Wolf and Assia Djebar. Also great current writers like Dorota Maslowska, Sibylle Lewitscharoff, Yasmina Reza and Mian Mian are missing (although i’d admit that they’re not canonical). And when you include political writers like Arendt what about Olympe de Gouges (probably the first feminist). And all marxists are missing: Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai. why? what’s the artistic criterion for the selection?
Really enjoying everyone’s extra suggestions as well as the original list! Would also add Jessica Hagedorn and Annie Dillard.
Also enjoying Francis R doing the equivalent of entering the only women’s restroom in a building full of men’s restrooms and then complaining that there are no urinals.
Mary Hunter Austin, Land of Little Rain
Maxiine Hong Kingston, Ceremony
Kate Chopin, Awakening
Oh the fun of this ever-expanding list!
There was a lot written and frankly a lot to go through so I was wondering if anyone had put Ayn Rand, who wrote the incredible Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead?
I’m sorry Tove Jansen. But. Mumintroll ???
Male writers are writers and female writers are “female creatives”? wow…
Dorris Alexander “Dee” Brown (February 29, 1908 – December 12, 2002) was an American novelist, historian, and librarian, (male writer)
I consider any type of competition absurd in this area, but even more absurd is that the women who made this list do not know who are female writers and who are male writers.
Jorge Luis Borges included Marguerite Yourcenar book, Oriental Tales, in his list, but the collection was left incomplete due to Borges’ death.
Borges list is his favorite books, or the ones that most influenced his own work, which is why it is called Personal Library.