In celebration of Women’s History Month, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite books written by women. Tweet us @curatormagazine and tell us your favorites.
Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life by Kathleen Norris
Norris’ ability to weave together her keen observation of both geographic and interior landscapes weaves a compelling tapestry that includes seeming extremes: Hawaii and South Dakota, a passionate marriage and Benedectine monks, a contemporary poet’s experience and wisdom from fourth-century desert monks.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
I suppose this is a bit like including “the Bible” on a list of spiritual books, but I can’t help myself. Alcott didn’t just write a book iconic to her time—she told a story and uncovered truths that remain hauntingly relevant today.
Middlemarch by George Eliot
One of the wisest books of fiction I’ve read.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
A brilliant, heartbreaking, and glorious book. Morrison’s words hauntingly encapsulate deep loss, a mother’s love, fear, pain, and death.
Passing by Nella Larsen
A 1929 tragic novella by a Harlem Renaissance writer, Larsen masterfully weaves a story of two black women who can both “pass” as white whenever they choose, mocking the absurdity of racial categories in a story as relevant today as in its first printing.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Cather braids together legend, folklore, and history into her main narrative for a novel that feels both realistic and enchanted.
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
A book of crisp and subtle lyrics, prose poetry, and short essays that have changed how I understand my country in the 21st century.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
A world-class journalist, Didion chronicles the year after her husband’s death in unflinching detail. In her telling, grief is a wave, crashing unceasingly upon her, drowning her, in an image that evokes the question of whether grief should be classified as a form of insanity.
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
When I tell you that I outright cackled aloud, well, I mean it.
Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
This collection of creative nonfiction essays is the product of a mind alive with wonder matched with a writer’s austere devotion to her craft. Her work continues to inspire me to see the severity and beauty in the world as well as writing’s demands and possibilities.
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
A coming-of-age romp, poet Lockwood’s memoir of a dysfunctional family, the Catholic priesthood, and literature as savior is profane and laugh-out-loud funny, even as the majority of the drama takes place inside the walls of her father’s rectory.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
A historical thriller–a page-turner–that has deepened and troubled my understanding of the country I was born into.
I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature by Lucia Perillo
A “read this one slowly, and then again” volume that explores the power of words, reckons with disability, and longs for the wilderness.
If you purchase a book through one of our Bookshop.org affiliate links, we may earn a commission that helps support our work — and ultimately pay our contributors. You’ll also be supporting independent bookstores across the country.