American female writers best novels. What are the best novels written by female authors from the United States? When was the novel published and what is its content? Which women’s novels from the United States are considered the best?

American female writers best novels

Of course, you can debate at length what the best American novels by female authors are. In fact, every reader will have their own personal preferences. So a top-so list of the best novels by American female authors isn’t entirely useful.

• New American novels 

What are the best novels written by female authors from America?

Our editors have chosen to compile an alphabetical overview of American women’s novels that many consider more than worth reading. We will also be adding new, excellent novels by American authors.

Jane Bowles – Two Serious Ladies

1943 novel
Editorial rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Miss Goering, an eccentric, impulsive New York heiress, resides in her house and tries not to be unhappy. Mrs Copperfield, an anxious, dutiful married woman, has a great fear of drowning, of lifts, of intruders in the night. Two serious ladies, nothing is natural for them and anything is possible.

Willa Cather – The Song of the Lark

1915 novel
Editorial rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado has a great gift – her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she forges a life as an artist. But if she can never go home again, nor can she leave behind her past.

Zelda Fitzgerald – Save Me the Waltz

1932 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was working on Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald was preparing her own story, which strangely parallels the narrative of her husband, throwing a fascinating light on Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work.

Joanne Greenberg – I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

1984 novel, published as Hannah Green
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Sixteen-year-old Deborah’s identity is shattering, as she retreats further and further from the ‘normal’ world into her imaginary kingdom of Yr, a fantastical inner refuge both lush and horrifying. Sent to a psychiatric hospital, she must, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, try to find a way back.

Jamaica Kincaid – Annie John

1985 coming of age novel uit 1985 about Antigua
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
An adored only child growing up in Antigua, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the very centre of the little girl’s existence. Loved and cherished, Annie grows and thrives within her mother’s shadow. When she turns twelve, however, Annie’s life changes, in ways that are often mysterious to her.

Elaine Kraf – I Am Clarence

1969 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
For Clarence’s mother, life revolves around her young son; she takes him to see specialists to find the cause of his blindness and developmental delays, protects him from the cruelty of other children, and loves him tenderly. But she has her own struggles too. Her sanity is precarious and fractured, making caregiving increasingly difficult.

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

1960 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Summers for Scout in the Deep South are long and golden. Her story is one of innocence, and growing up. It is also about justice. When Scout’s father Atticus Finch, a lawyer, agrees to defend a black man against an accusation by a white girl, he takes on the prejudice of the whole town.

Bernice L. McFadden –  Sugar

2000 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
When she arrives in the southern town of Bigelow, it isn’t long before the neighbourhood is alight with gossip and suspicion. Sugar fears her past is catching up with her. Then she meets Pearl, a woman trying to forget her own trauma. As these next-door neighbours become unlikely friends, they wonder if their lives could finally be changing for the better. But small towns have long memories.

Toni Morrison – Beloved

1987 novel about slavery
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home – the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, Beloved.

Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

1957 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Opening with the enigmatic question ‘Who is John Galt?’, Atlas Shrugged envisions a world where the ‘men of talent’ – the great innovators, producers and creators – have mysteriously disappeared. With the US economy now faltering, businesswoman Dagny Taggart is struggling to get the transcontinental railroad up and running. For her John Galt is the enemy, but as she will learn, nothing in this situation is quite as it seems.

Betty Smith – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

1943 Brooklyn novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
The Nolan family are first-generation immigrants to the United States. Originating in Ireland and Austria, their life in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn is poor and deprived, but their sacrifices make it possible for their children to grow up in a land of boundless opportunity. Francie Nolan is the eldest daughter of the family. Alert, imaginative and resourceful, her journey through the first years of a century of profound change is difficult – and transformative…read on >

Jean Stafford – The Mountain Lion

1947 coming of age novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim mother and prissy older sisters, the world of adult authority. One summer, they are sent from their childhood home in suburban Los Angeles to their uncle’s Colorado mountain ranch, where they write, hunt, roam. But this untamed wilderness soon becomes tainted by dark stirrings of sexual desire.

Gertrude Stein – The Making of Americans

1925 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Gertrude Stein sets out to tell “a history of a family’s progress,” radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships. As the history progresses over three generations, Stein also meditates on her own writing, on the making of The Making of Americans, and on America.

Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

1920 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May’s cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence.

Edith Wharton – The Glimpses of the Moon

1922 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
Nick Lansing and Susy Branch are young and attractive, but penniless. Gracefully moving through New York high society, they have the right connections but none of the wealth. When they inconveniently fall in love, Susy devises a plan. They will marry and spend a year flitting across Europe, staying in the homes of their rich friends and living off honeymoon gifts until either one of them meets a better, richer prospect.

Marguerite Young – Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

1968 novel
Editorial Rating: ∗∗∗∗∗ (excellent)
This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel—a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young’s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness she tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality.

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Afbeelding bovenzijde: Zelda Fitzgerald in 1922 (Public domain)