Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966): At her death, the Russian poet was considered the greatest woman poet in the history of Russian literature.
Jane Austen (1775-1817): Who hasn’t read Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice? The English writer first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life, creating the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in her novels.
Colette (1873-1954): The French writer’s best novels are remarkable for their command of sensual description. Her greatest strength as a writer is an exact sensory evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colors of her world.
Emily Dickinson (1830-86): The American lyric poet lived in seclusion and commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered to be one of the two leading 19th-century American poets.
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960): The American folklorist and writer, whose work celebrated the African American culture of the rural South, was associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Toni Morrison (born 1931): The American writer, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, is noted for her examination of black experience (particularly black female experience) within the black community. Her Beloved (1987), based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery, won a Pulitzer.
Alice Munro (born 1931): The Canadian short-story writer gained international recognition with her exquisitely drawn stories, usually set in southwestern Ontario, peopled by characters of Scotch-Irish stock. Munro’s work is noted for its precise imagery and narrative style, which is at once lyrical, compelling, economical, and intense, revealing the depth and complexities in the emotional lives of ordinary individuals.
Murasaki Shikibu (978-1014): The Japanese writer’s Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) is generally considered the greatest work of Japanese literature and thought to be the world’s oldest full novel.
Sappho (610-570 BCE): The Greek lyric poet has been greatly admired in all ages for the beauty of her writing style. She ranks with Archilochus and Alcaeus, among Greek poets, for her ability to impress readers with a lively sense of her personality.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): The English writer’s novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power.
By Kathleen Kuiper
Editor, Encyclopædia Britannica: 300 Women who changed the World
