Authors Like Sarah Waters

Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins was born in London in 1824 and was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, whose magazine All the Year Round serialised The Woman in White in 1859–60. The novel, in which a young heiress is shut in an asylum under another woman’s name, is told by several narrators in turn; The Moonstone is often called one of the first English detective novels. He died in 1889.

Charles Dickens

British · Oliver Twist (1838), Bleak House (1853), Great Expectations (1861)

Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and died in Kent in 1870. Oliver Twist follows an orphan from the workhouse into Fagin’s gang of child pickpockets in London. Dickens’s treatment of his wife Catherine, whom he left in 1858, has damaged his reputation; letters published in 2019 indicate he tried to have her committed to an asylum.

Every book by Charles Dickens →

Daphne du Maurier

British · Rebecca (1938), My Cousin Rachel (1951)

Du Maurier was born in London in 1907 and spent most of her life in Cornwall, where she died in 1989. Rebecca follows a shy young second wife at Manderley, where her husband’s dead first wife is present in every room, and ends with the house in flames. In 1941 critics pointed out similarities between Rebecca and the Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco’s A Sucessora (1934); du Maurier said she had never heard of the book.

Every book by Daphne du Maurier →

Elizabeth Bowen

Anglo-Irish · The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949)

Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899 and died in 1973. She lived in London through the Second World War and reported on Irish opinion for the British Ministry of Information. The Heat of the Day is set in the city during the Blitz, where a woman learns that her lover may be passing secrets to the enemy.

Shirley Jackson

American · The Haunting of Hill House (1959), We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Jackson was born in San Francisco in 1916. Her story ‘The Lottery’, published in The New Yorker in 1948, brought the magazine hundreds of letters from angry and frightened readers. She died in 1965, aged 48. The Little Stranger was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award in 2009.

Michel Faber

Dutch-born British · Under the Skin (2000), The Crimson Petal and the White (2002)

Faber was born in The Hague in 1960, grew up in Australia from 1967 and moved to Scotland in 1993. The Crimson Petal and the White, an 850-page novel set in 1870s London, follows Sugar, a nineteen-year-old prostitute. His first novel, Under the Skin, became Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film with Scarlett Johansson.

Emma Donoghue

Irish-Canadian · Slammerkin (2000), Room (2010), The Wonder (2016)

Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969 and lives in London, Ontario. Her history Passions Between Women (1993) covers British lesbian culture from 1668 to 1801. Slammerkin grows from an eighteenth-century newspaper report of a servant who killed her employer; Room was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and filmed in 2015. Her most recent novel, The Paris Express (2025), was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.

Hilary Mantel

British · Beyond Black (2005), Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

Mantel was born in Derbyshire in 1952 and won the Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the first woman to do so. The novels follow Thomas Cromwell from his boyhood in Putney to the court of Henry VIII. Beyond Black follows a professional medium in the suburbs around London. She died in September 2022.

Every book by Hilary Mantel →

Kate Atkinson

British · Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), Life After Life (2013), Transcription (2018)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. In Life After Life, Ursula Todd is born in 1910 and dies again and again, living through the Blitz in several versions; Transcription follows a young woman recruited by MI5 in 1940.

Every book by Kate Atkinson →

Jeanette Winterson

British · Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989)

Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and raised by Pentecostal adoptive parents in Accrington, the background of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award. Sexing the Cherry is set in seventeenth-century London around a giant woman, the Dog-Woman, and retells the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses.