I found a great website(see below) that lists 100 book titles that say something about what it is to be a woman. These include fiction, historical works, practical wisdom, social criticism, and philosophy texts. I thought it would be interesting and helpful to post this. Enjoy!
The Essential Woman’s Library
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Aesop’s Fables
- Antigone by Sophocles
- The Republic by Plato
- The Metamorphoses by Ovid
- Anglo-Saxon Poetry translated by S. A. J. Bradley
- The Pillow Book by Sei Shonaon
- One Thousand and One Nights
- The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
- Erec and Enide by Chrétien de Troyes
- The Divine Comedyby Dante Aligheri
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan
- All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare
- King Lear by William Shakespeare
- Othello by William Shakespeare
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
- The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
- The Real Mother Goose by Blanche Fisher Wright
- Emmaby Jane Austen
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
- Fairy Tales by Hans Christen Andersen
- Democracy in Americaby Alexis de Tocqueville
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beacher Stowe
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Hard Times by Charles Dickens
- A Tale of Two Citiesby Charles Dickens
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Goblin Market and Other Poemsby Christina Rossetti
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Little Womenby Louisa May Alcott
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Anna Kareninaby Leo Tolstoy
- Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
- A Doll’s Houseby Henrik Ibsen
- The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
- Tess of the d’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
- An Ideal Husbandby Oscar Wilde
- Lady Windermere’s Fanby Oscar Wilde
- Joan of Arc by Mark Twain
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
- Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
- Howard’s Endby E. M. Forster
- Twenty Years at Hull Houseby Jane Addams
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
- My Ántonia by Willa Cather
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
- Etiquetteby Emily Post
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
- Essays on Women by Edith Stein
- Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
- Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Rebecca by Daphne DuMarier
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon
- The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Storiesby Flannery O’Connor
- Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Landon
- Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
- The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
- To Kill a Mockingbirdby Harper Lee
- Mastering the Art of French Cookingby Julia Child
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- Loaves and Fishes by Dorothy Day
- The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- The Princess Bride by William Golding
- Cold Sassy Treeby Olive Ann Burns
- The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
- Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovály
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
- Wit by Margaret Edson
- Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
- First Family by Joseph Ellis