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The Feminist Novel

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex gave the century its frame (one is not born, but becomes, a woman), and a global generation of novelists set out to render that becoming from the inside. Seven books run from an Ireland-banned debut through West African testimony to the fractured, form-breaking capstone that gives the movement its best-known title.

  1. Cover of The Country Girls
    The Country Girls

    Edna O'Brien · 1960

    Lvl 3192pp

    O'Brien's convent-school escapees go looking for sex, freedom, and Dublin, and Ireland banned the book and burned copies in her own village: desire treated as a girl's plain right, decades before it was fashionable to say so.

  2. Cover of So Long a Letter
    So Long a Letter

    Mariama Bâ · 1979

    Lvl 396pp

    Bâ's widow writes a long letter to her oldest friend cataloguing what polygamy actually costs a woman: grief, economics, and betrayal itemized with total, controlled clarity.

  3. Cover of Woman at Point Zero
    Woman at Point Zero

    Nawal El Saadawi · 1975

    Lvl 3128pp

    El Saadawi interviewed a woman on death row for killing her pimp, and turned the testimony into fiction fierce enough to get its author imprisoned herself.

  4. Cover of Nervous Conditions
    Nervous Conditions

    Tsitsi Dangarembga · 1988

    Lvl 4204pp

    Dangarembga's Zimbabwean schoolgirl watches her cousin literally starve resisting the education that's supposed to liberate her: the costs of both tradition and 'improvement' held in the same unflinching gaze.

  5. Cover of The Mandarins
    The Mandarins

    Simone de Beauvoir · 1954

    Lvl 6610pp

    Beauvoir's postwar Paris intellectuals argue politics and sleep with each other's friends: the movement's founding philosopher turning her own milieu into six hundred pages of fiction.

  6. Cover of The Bloody Chamber
    The Bloody Chamber

    Angela Carter · 1979

    Lvl 6160pp

    Carter runs Bluebeard, Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast through a feminist furnace: fairy tale material repurposed to expose sexual power instead of softening it.

  7. Cover of The Golden Notebook
    The Golden Notebook

    Doris Lessing · 1962

    Lvl 8576pp

    The capstone: Lessing splits one woman's life into four colored notebooks (political, personal, creative, and a fifth that tries to hold them together), and in fracturing the form this completely, breaks it wide open for everyone after.