Classics by British women writers

[Guest]

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (great fun to pair with The Canterbury Tales, although probably an older high school student would find it more fun)

Lady Mary Wroth, selected sonnets

Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World (almost but not quite 17-century sci-fi) and "The Hunting of the Hare" (one of the first poems against cruelty to animals)

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (first novel I know of centering on the slave trade)

Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters

Fanny Burney, Evelina

Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women

Dorothy Wordsworth, Journals

Anything and everything by Austen, including her History of England

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; North and South (Ruth is also very good, but the subject is an illegitimate child)

Christina Rosetti, selected poems

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and To the Lighthouse

Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (preview for content)

Antonia White, Frost in May

Rumer Godden, The River (Godden is wonderful to pair with EM Forster's Passage to India)

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

 

This is obviously not a complete list, just a compilation of suggestions; and its emphasis on earlier historical periods is largely due to the fact that there are so many more women writers and their books from Austen's time on, and these books tend to be more visible and more readily available to choose from.

Edited October 20, 2010 by Guest

[Laura Corin]

Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss (best to worst, in my own order).

 

Laura

[Guest]

Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss (best to worst, in my own order).

 

Laura

 

I left her off the list on purpose because in high school I hated Middlemarch and the kids I taught later on hated Silas Marner. Even now I find what she does intellectually interesting, but I can't respond emotionally to her characters. Thanks for the reminder that indeed lots of other people do really take to her books, and that I shouldn't have let my personal dislike affect whether or not she was on the list.

 

Which is your favorite? Did you like her books when you were high school age, or later on?

[Laura Corin]

Personally, I loved Middlemarch, but I would use Silas Marner with students and let them come to Middlemarch later. I do find the characters in Silas Marner affecting. The Mill on the Floss is a strange book in two parts - I don't recommend it.

 

Laura

[Lori D.]

Dorothy Sayers = The Man Born to be King (play); Are Women Human (2 essays); Mind of the Maker (non-fiction)

 

P.D. James = Children of Men

[Pam L in Mid Tenn]

Dorothy Sayers

Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters)

Agatha Christie

[Brilliant]

I left her off the list on purpose because in high school I hated Middlemarch and the kids I taught later on hated Silas Marner. Even now I find what she does intellectually interesting, but I can't respond emotionally to her characters. Thanks for the reminder that indeed lots of other people do really take to her books, and that I shouldn't have let my personal dislike affect whether or not she was on the list.

 

Which is your favorite? Did you like her books when you were high school age, or later on?

 

Silas Marner is one of my all-time favorite books. I didn't read it until I was an adult. My dd read it when she was 16, and loves it, too. I found it very moving. I also count Eliot's Adam Bede as one of my all-time favorite books. It has some very mature themes (an illicit romance, a murder, another death) but handled without sensationalism.

[In The Great White North]

I left her off the list on purpose because in high school I hated Middlemarch and the kids I taught later on hated Silas Marner. Even now I find what she does intellectually interesting, but I can't respond emotionally to her characters. Thanks for the reminder that indeed lots of other people do really take to her books, and that I shouldn't have let my personal dislike affect whether or not she was on the list.

 

Which is your favorite? Did you like her books when you were high school age, or later on?

 

I loved Adam Bede in high school - that's what made me read the rest of hers but I didn't like any of the others as well.

 

Rumor Godden also wrote In this House of Brede, which I liked better than any other book on the list.

[Guest]

 

Rumor Godden also wrote In this House of Brede, which I liked better than any other book on the list.

 

I loved that book too.

 

But The River pairs so well with E. M. Forster and is now considered by many critics as the better assessment of the British in India, so I felt it had ramifications for people who read history and literature in synchronization -- one of the major themes of modern history being European empire-building and its consequences. The River was also one of the first films made on location in India and so is also historically significant in that respect.