Feminist literature is one of the most (if not the most) important mechanisms through which feminist ideals are spread. While feminist non-fiction works tend to carry the ideological weight of the movement, fiction provides a necessary sort of mythology. These stories represent the struggles faced by women and femmes the world over, providing a mirror through which one’s own life can be viewed. Here are 10 of the best feminist novels of all time, ranked.
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Madeline Miller exploded into the literary scene with her stunning 2012 debut The Song of Achilles, which retells the story of Homer’s Illiad centering around the queer relationship between the demigod Achilles and his lover Patroclus. In Circe, Miller retools Homer’s Odyssey, retelling the tale of the maligned and misunderstood goddess from which the title takes its name. Desperate to escape a life of subjugation and servitude, Circe flees from her smothering home in the sun god Helios’ hall to pursue the art of witchcraft and magic on a desolate island. She spends time gathering herbs for spells and turning visiting sailors into farm animals, living the dream.
Set in South Korea, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is the story of home-maker Yeong-hye, who decides to stop eating meat entirely after having increasingly disturbing dreams about animal slaughter. Her husband and the rest of her extended family refuse to support her decision, even going so far as to attempt to force-feed her meat. At its core, The Vegetarian is a novel about one woman’s quest for bodily autonomy and the fierce opposition that such decisions are met with even from her most intimate relations.
Imogen Binnie’s Nevada is a complex work of transfeminine fiction, a subset of feminist fiction that is sorely needed in the world. Maria Griffiths hates her life in New York City but she doesn’t know it yet. After getting fired from her bookstore job and breaking up with her girlfriend, she steals her ex’s car, buys $400 worth of heroin, and road trips to Nevada. There she meets a young Walmart employee named James, who is having thoughts of transitioning that Maria tries to tease out. It’s a novel that’s as hard and lonely and beautiful as the highways Marie travels; you just have to ride it out.
Despite lacking major female characters, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a stunning work of feminist speculative fiction that takes aim at the gender binary and how it is used to structure power in human societies. The science fiction novel centers around an astronaut who journeys to the planet Gethen, populated by an androgynous alien society whose members only take on sexual characteristics during a brief mating period called “kemmer.” What does a world without the gender binary look like? A world almost entirely free of war and oppression.
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is the story of Janie Crawford, a Black woman in the early 20th-century South who seeks to find her freedom and identity across three separate marriages. The novel provides an intersectional view of women’s experiences, revolving around the struggles of a lead character whose Black femme identity causes her to run up against the heavily institutionalized systems of racism and patriarchy. In the end, however, the book’s central theme is to not be one of the many with eyes upturned toward God, government, or societal expectations, but one of the few who turn their eyes inward to find who they truly are.
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is a novel that defies categorization. It’s part memoir, part treatise on gender in society, and part fiction about a person’s quest for acceptance and love. The novel is about Jess Goldberg, a working-class butch lesbian who comes of age in the early 1970’s in America. The novel doesn’t pull any punches and paints a brutally honest picture of the intolerance and homophobia present in society at the time. The novel is deeply important as a work of trans fiction, written at a time when modern ideas around trans identity were still in their nascent stages of development.
Another work of trans femme fiction, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is the story of the complex relationship between a cis, trans, and formerly trans trio of characters living in Brooklyn. At the core of the novel is Ames, who detransitioned from their former life as Amy to live as a man with a new lover named Katrina. Ames’ ex, a trans woman named Reese, has lost touch with Ames after the latter’s detransition, but the trio are thrown together again after Katrina becomes pregnant with Ames’ child. It’s a tough read about the realities of living as a trans femme in a world where many choose to reject the lived realities of trans people entirely.
For anyone who knows their Greek mythology (Madeline Miller fans, I’m looking at you) purple is related to the color of divinity and gods. God is a central, though silent, character in Alice Walker’s epistolary novel The Color Purple, and the sole recipient of the letters of its main character Celie. Through her letters to God, Celie processes her life as a queer Black woman in the rural South. Her relationships with her husband and her father are fraught with abuse, and she seeks refuge in the arms of a woman named Shug Avery, who helps her finally experience true love and self-acceptance.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a story of mental illness and the way that society pathologizes and punishes women for experiencing it. Set in the 1950s, this semi-autobiographical novel centers around Esther Greenwood, a young woman whose descent into depression causes her to become alienated from those around her. As a result, she’s subject to myriad medical procedures like electroshock therapy and insulin overdoses (procedures that never worked, to begin with) and slowly loses hope in the institutions meant to help.
The Handmaid’s Tale is a cautionary one. Margaret Atwood imagines a world where feminist ideology is essentially destroyed, allowing a totalitarian theocracy to come to power. In the story, humanity is experiencing a global fertility crisis, leading a reactionary political sect to overthrow the American government and establish the nation of Gilead in its place, a place where women are treated as property and subject to sexual slavery. All hope is not lost, however, as a sexual servant or “handmaid” named Offred leads a secret revolution to topple the patriarchy once and for all.
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