Strong women in fiction and nonfiction

Discover inspiring books featuring strong women in fiction and nonfiction. Explore powerful female protagonists and real-life heroines in this curated list of must-read titles.

Myra Breckinridge Cover
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Myra Breckinridge

by Gore Vidal

Myra's personality is altered by her sex change operation and Myron is transported back through time to the year 1948.
The Gravedigger's Daughter Cover
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The Gravedigger's Daughter

by Joyce Carol Oates

From one of the greatest literary forces of our time, an intensely realized and masterful epic of a young womans struggle for identity and survival in post-World War II America.
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The Song of the Lark

by Willa Cather

A story of a young woman's awakening as an artist and her struggle to escape the constraints of a small town in Colorado.
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Villette

by Charlotte Bronte

From the author of Jane Eyre, a strikingly modern story of a young woman starting over—with an introduction by Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of Chemistry “Villette! Villette! Have you read it?” exclaimed George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë’s final novel appeared in 1853. “It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.” Arguably Charlotte Brontë’s most refined and deeply felt work—Virginia Woolf called it Brontë’s “finest novel”—Villette draws on its author’s own experiences as a governess, and her profound loneliness following the deaths of her three siblings. It tells the story of parentless, friendless Lucy Snowe, who flees from an unhappy past in England to begin a new life as a teacher at a boarding school in the small French town of Villette. Soon Lucy’s struggle for independence is challenged by both her friendship with a worldly English doctor and her feelings for an autocratic schoolmaster. Brontë’s strikingly modern heroine must decide if there is any man in her society with whom she can live and still be free. The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance. AMERICAN INDIAN STORIES • THE AWAKENING • THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY • THE HEADS OF CERBERUS • LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET • LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS • PASSING • THE TRANSFORMATION OF PHILIP JETTAN • VILLETTE • THERE IS CONFUSION • THE SELECTED POEMS OF EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
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Jennie Gerhardt

by Theodore Dreiser

Regarded as one of Dreiser's best novels, Jennie Gerhardt is here recaptured as it was originally written, restoring it to its complete, unexpurgated form.
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The Last of Her Kind

by Sigrid Nunez

Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. A decade later, Ann is convicted of murder, and Georgette finds more complicated and mysterious forces at work.
A Proper Marriage Cover
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A Proper Marriage

by Doris Lessing

Twenty-something Martha begins to realize that her marriage has been a terrible mistake.
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Chance

by Joseph Conrad

Chance was Conrad's first commercial success after nearly twenty years as a writer, and his first novel to have a happy ending. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, and her long struggle to find happiness and dignity.
Jane Eyre Cover
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Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

An orphan girl who accepts employment as a governess finds herself involved in a family secret and in love with her employer.
Free Food for Millionaires Cover
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Free Food for Millionaires

by Min Jin Lee

"Goodbye, Columbus meets the novels of Amy Tan in this American story of class, society and identity that marks the debut of a new voice in fiction"--Provided by the publisher.
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I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead. Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and pitiless in exposing the follies of the time, I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks—and curious rewards—of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.
The Red Tent, Tenth Anniversary Edition Cover
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The Red Tent, Tenth Anniversary Edition

 

No summary available.
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Nobody Said Not to Go

by Ken Cuthbertson

Known as "Mickey" to her friends, Emily Hahn traveled across the country dressed as a boy in the 192Os; worked as a Harvey Girl in Taos, New Mexico; ran away to the Belgian Congo as a Red Cross worker during the Great Depression; was the concubine of a Chinese poet in Shanghai in the 1930s; became an opium addict; had an affair and an illegitimate child with the head of the British Secret Service in Hong Kong just before the outbreak of World War II; was involved in underground relief work in occupied Hong Kong; and moved back to the United States and became a pioneer in the fields of environmentalism and wildlife preservation before her death last year. Mickey Hahn also wrote hundreds of articles and short stories for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1995 and wrote fifty-two books in her lifetime, astonishing her publishers and agents by moving effortlessly from biography to humor to fiction to travel memoir to history.
Gellhorn Cover
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Gellhorn

by Caroline Moorehead

A portrait of the preeminent female war correspondent describes her birth in turn-of-the-century St. Louis, her work in major cities throughout the world, her many powerful friendships, and her marriage to Hemingway.
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Vamps & Tramps

by Camille Paglia

The bestselling author of Sexual Personae and Sex, Art, and American Culture is back with a fiery new collection of essays on everything from art and celebrity to gay activism, Lorena Bobbitt to Bill and Hillary. These essays have never appeared in book form, and many will be appearing in print for the first time.
Infidel Cover
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Infidel

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her life story. An advocate for free speech and women's rights, Hirsi Ali lives under armed protection because of her outspoken criticism of the Islamic faith in which she was raised.
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Flapper

by Joshua Zeitz

Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who heralded a radical change in American culture and launched the first truly modern decade. The New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Flapper is an inside look at the 1920s. With tales of Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form; Lois Long, the woman who christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife; three of America’s first celebrities: Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks; Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway; Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era; and more, this is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness. Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the 1920s to exhilarating life.