Great Women Writers

Set in the Midlands in the late 1820s, Middlemarch touches on a wide variety of topics including women's rights, religion, the status of marriage and education issues. But we let reviews speak for themselves:

Virgina Woolf: "...the magnificent book that, with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people"

Emily Dickinson: "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory – except that in a few instances 'this mortal [George Eliot] has already put on immortality'."

V.S. Prichett: "No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative."

Virgina Woolf deals with women's suffrage and examines the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success through the daily lives and romantic attachments of two women. This 1919 novel should have been mandatory reading for all women at that time, and even more so now. After all, is marriage mandatory for happiness? And can marriage and love coexist?

Their Eyes were Watching God tracks the life and history of Janie Crawford through a story-telling session by her best friend Pheoby. The rich narrative travels through the American Civil War and gives us a glimpse of the slave trade through the life of Janie's grandmother. This novel has become a seminal piece of work in both African-American and women's literature, as Zora Neale Hurston lends a strong, compelling voice to the meek, teenage girl who grows up to be independent force in the community.

The Age of Innocence won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making it the first novel written by a woman to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Bonus trivia: Edith Wharton was 58 when she won. The Age of Innocence presents a picture of upper-class New York society in the late 19th century, where newly engaged Newland Archer is attracted to Ellen Olenska, a recent divorcee whose status causes distress to their inner circles. Eventually, the trappings of responsibilities to self and society cause them to abandon their love.

This classic novel has now come to serve as inspiration for monster origin stories, but none comes close to how groundbreaking the novel was when it was first published anonymously in 1818. Not only was the novel one of the earliest to discuss man's manipulation of science to produce fantastical results, it also goes in-depth into the gruesome nature of mankind.