Reading List
The Best Books
In October 1928 Virginia Woolf told two halls of women students at Cambridge that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction — five hundred pounds a year, and a lock on the door. In 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a story about a woman confined to a nursery by her doctor husband, and sent a copy to the physician who had prescribed her the same rest cure. In 2017 two New York Times reporters spent months persuading women to go on the record about one Hollywood producer. The twelve books below each made something sayable that had not been sayable before — about money, marriage, bodies, work or power — and each one still reads like news.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Classics, essays and memoir · 1892–2021 · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
Twelve books, published between 1892 and 2021: five classics that set the terms (Woolf, Gilman, de Beauvoir, Angelou, Morrison), Atwood's dystopia, two short essays you can finish in an evening (Adichie and bell hooks), and four recent memoirs and works of reporting. If you only read one, it is the oldest argument on the list — and it is shorter than you think.
The list at a glance
- 01 · A Room of One's Own — Virginia Woolf
- 02 · The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman
- 03 · The Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir
- 04 · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou
- 05 · Beloved — Toni Morrison
- 06 · The Handmaid's Tale — Margaret Atwood
- 07 · We Should All Be Feminists — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- 08 · All About Love — bell hooks
- 09 · Educated — Tara Westover
- 10 · She Said — Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey
- 11 · Between Two Kingdoms — Suleika Jaouad
- 12 · Our Women on the Ground — Zahra Hankir (editor)
If you only read one, read A Room of One's Own. It is a hundred pages, it is funny, and almost every other book on this list is answering it.
Go to the entry →12 books every woman should read
Essay
A Room of One's OwnStart here
Two lectures Woolf gave at Newnham and Girton colleges in 1928, rewritten into one long essay. Her question is why there have been so few great women writers, and her answer is material, not mystical: money, time, privacy and an education. The famous invention is Judith Shakespeare, William's equally gifted sister, who has no way to use her gift.
Why read itIt is the founding argument for everything else here, and it is a pleasure to read — digressive, sly, and much angrier underneath than it lets on.
Short story
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman recovering from what her physician husband calls a temporary nervous depression is confined to an upstairs room and forbidden to write. She writes anyway, in secret, and the wallpaper begins to move. Gilman had been given the same “rest cure” and later said she wrote the story to save other women from it.
Why read itTwenty pages, and the most frightening thing on the list. Read it in one sitting.
Philosophy
The Second Sex
Beauvoir's study of how women have been defined as the “Other” to men — in biology, history, myth, marriage and motherhood. The second volume opens with its most quoted line: one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. The Vatican put the book on its Index of Forbidden Books.
Why read itLong and uneven, and worth it for the second volume alone. Read it in the 2009 Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation, which restored the cuts made in the first English edition.
Memoir
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The first of Angelou's seven autobiographies: a childhood in Stamps, Arkansas and in St. Louis and San Francisco, racism, a rape at the age of eight and the years of silence that followed, and the teenage pregnancy with which the book ends. It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970.
Why read itIt reads as a record of how a girl learns to speak again — literally — and of the women who make that possible.
Novel
Beloved
Sethe, who escaped slavery in Kentucky, lives in a house in Ohio haunted by the daughter she killed rather than let her be taken back. Then a young woman calling herself Beloved arrives. Morrison drew on the case of Margaret Garner, who did the same in 1856.
Why read itNot an easy book, and not meant to be. Give it fifty pages before you decide; the structure is the point.
Dystopian novel
The Handmaid's Tale
In the Republic of Gilead, a theocracy that has replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful men to bear their children. Offred tells her story in fragments. Atwood's own rule while writing it was that nothing could go into the book that had not already happened somewhere in history.
Why read itThat rule is why the book keeps coming back. Read the “Historical Notes” at the end; they change everything before them.
Essay
We Should All Be Feminists
Adichie's 2012 TEDx talk, adapted into a fifty-page essay: what it was like to be called a feminist as an insult as a teenager in Nigeria, and why the word is still worth keeping. Sweden gave a copy to every sixteen-year-old in the country in 2015.
Why read itThe quickest way into the whole subject. Give it to someone who thinks they are not interested.
Essay
All About Love
hooks argues that love is not a feeling but a practice — care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge — and that a culture taught to confuse love with possession and abuse produces people who cannot give or receive it. The first book in her trilogy on love.
Why read itA book about relationships that is really about power. Many readers come back to it at different ages and find a different book.
Memoir
Educated
Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family, never went to school, and worked in her father's scrapyard. She taught herself enough to get into Brigham Young University at seventeen, and went on to a doctorate at Cambridge. The book is about what that cost her with her family.
Why read itThe question at its centre — how much of yourself you can keep when you leave where you came from — is the one many women recognise.
Journalism
She Said
The two New York Times reporters behind the October 2017 investigation into Harvey Weinstein reconstruct how they got women to go on the record, and what the settlements and non-disclosure agreements had been built to hide. Their reporting shared the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Why read itRead it as a procedural: it shows exactly how silence is engineered, and exactly how it is broken.
Memoir
Between Two Kingdoms
Jaouad was diagnosed with leukaemia at twenty-two and wrote about it in her New York Times column “Life, Interrupted”. When treatment ended she set out on a 15,000-mile road trip across America to meet the strangers who had written to her during it.
Why read itA book about the part nobody writes about: what to do with your life once you have been told you get to keep it.
Journalism
Our Women on the Ground
Nineteen Arab women journalists write about reporting on wars, uprisings and their aftermath in their own countries — Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Lebanon among them — and about the particular access, and the particular danger, that comes with being a local woman.
Why read itA useful counterweight to a list that is mostly British and American: this is who actually does the reporting.
RecommendedRead my full book recommendation for Our Women on the Ground →
Frequently asked questions
What is the one book every woman should read?
If it has to be one, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It is short, it is funny, and its argument — that women need money, time and privacy to do serious work — is the one most of the other books here are extending or answering.
What are the best feminist classics to start with?
Start with the short ones: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists (2014) can all be read in an evening. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is the long, foundational one to read after them.
Are there novels on this list, or is it all nonfiction?
Three of the twelve are fiction: Gilman's story The Yellow Wallpaper, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The rest are essays, memoir and journalism. For a list that is all fiction, see books by female authors.
What are good recent books for women?
From the last ten years on this list: Tara Westover's Educated (2018), She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (2019), Zahra Hankir's anthology Our Women on the Ground (2019) and Suleika Jaouad's Between Two Kingdoms (2021).
Are these books only for women?
No. They are books about women's lives, and most of them were written to be read by everyone. Adichie's essay in particular was written with men in the audience in mind.
Footnotes
- A Room of One's Own — Wikipedia
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper” (1913)
- The Second Sex — Wikipedia
- Beloved (novel) — Wikipedia
- Announcement of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winners
- We Should All Be Feminists — Wikipedia
List last reviewed 13 October 2026.
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
If this list was useful, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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