Author Biographies
Following is a listing (alphabetically, by last name) of classic women authors’ biographies currently on this site. Please note that this site lists only women authors who are deceased. These are the women authors whose shoulders today’s writers stand on, and whose work should continue to be read and studied.
We’re continually adding authors to the site; you’ll find many more we haven’t yet posted. They’re on our wish list, which also details writer’s guidelines for those who may want to contribute biographies, or any other great content relating to classic women authors.
When you link through to any biography, you’ll find a listing of other articles related to individual authors toward the end of the posts. Currently, we’re building a more powerful search tool for browsing authors on the site and articles related to them.
There are also biographies of literary-adjacent women on this site, which you’ll find in the categories of Journalists and Other Rad Voices.
Louisa May Alcott
Paula Gunn Allen
Maya Angelou
Gloria Anzaldua
Samira Azzam
Jane Austen
Mary Hunter Austin
Natalie Babbitt
Enid Bagnold
Elspeth Barker
Djuna Barnes
Margaret Ayer Barnes
Natalie Clifford Barney
Nina Bawden
Aphra Behn
Gwendolyn B. Bennett
Elizabeth Bishop
Enid Blyton
Louise Bogan
Elizabeth Bowen
Kay Boyle
Anne Bradstreet
Vera Brittain
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
Anita Brookner
Gwendolyn Brooks
Brigid Brophy
Margaret Wise Brown
Pearl S. Buck
Simone de Beauvoir
Julia de Burgos
Fanny Burney
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Octavia E. Butler
Leonora Carrington
Rachel Carson
Angela Carter
Vera Caspary
Elizabeth Cary
Rosario Castellanos
Willa Cather
Susanna Centlivre
Eileen Chang
Lydia Maria Child
Alice Childress
Kate Chopin
Agatha Christie
Beverly Cleary
Lucille Clifton
Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)
J. California Cooper
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Kamala Das
Grazia Deledda
Emily Dickinson
Isak Dinesen
Mary Mapes Dodge
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
Daphne du Maurier
Lois Duncan
Marguerite Duras
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Maria Edgeworth
George Eliot
Eleanor Estes
Jessie Redmon Fauset
Edna Ferber
Rachel Field
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Penelope Fitzgerald
Louise Fitzhugh
Janet Flanner
Miles Franklin
Marilyn French
Elizabeth Gaskell
Martha Gellhorn
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Natalia Ginzburg
Ellen Glasgow
Susan Glaspell
Rumer Godden
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Nadine Gordimer
Angelina Weld Grimké
Radclyffe Hall
Virginia Hamilton
Helene Hanff
Lorraine Hansberry
Frances Watkins Harper
Lillian Hellman
Marguerite Henry
Patricia Highsmith
Laura Z. Hobson
bell hooks
Winifred Holtby
Fannie Hurst
Zora Neale Hurston
Helen Hunt Jackson
Shirley Jackson
Tove Jansson
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Sarah Orne Jewett
Georgia Douglas Johnson
Helene Johnson
Ingrid Jonker
Caroline Kirkland
Maxine Kumin
Selma Lagerlöf
Margaret Landon
Nella Larsen
Emma Lazarus
Harper Lee
Ursula K. Le Guin
Madeleine L’Engle
Amy Levy
Lois Lenski
Doris Lessing
Astrid Lindgren
Lispector, Clarice
Anita Loos
Audre Lorde
Maud Hart Lovelace
Amy Lowell
Mina Loy
Katherine Mansfield
Beryl Markham
Paule Marshall
Harriet Martineau
Betty MacDonald
Mary McCarthy
Carson McCullers
Grace Metalious
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Gabriela Mistral
Margaret Mitchell
Nancy Mitford
L.M. Montgomery
Moore, Ruth
Elsa Morante
Jan Morris
Toni Morrison
Iris Murdoch
E. Nesbit
Anaïs Nin
Mary Norton
Flannery O’Connor
Mary O’Hara
Mary Oliver
Tillie Olsen
Baroness Emma Orczy
Grace Paley
Dorothy Parker
Ann Petry
Sylvia Plath
Eleanor H. Porter
Katherine Anne Porter
Beatrix Potter
Dawn Powell
Barbara Pym
Kathleen Raine
Ayn Rand
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Adrienne Rich
Lola Ridge
Jean Rhys
Christina Rossetti
Susanna Rowson
Vita Sackville-West
Françoise Sagan
George Sand
May Sarton
Olive Schriener
Anna Sewell
Anne Sexton
Ntozake Shange
Margery Sharp
Mary Shelley
Nan Shepherd
Mary Sidney
May Sinclair
Edith Sitwell
Betty Smith
Dodie Smith
Stevie Smith
Susan Sontag
Muriel Spark
Eulalie Spence
Anne Spencer
Christina Stead
Gertrude Stein
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Elizabeth Taylor
Sydney Taylor
Sara Teasdale
Flora Thompson
P.L. Travers
Sigrid Undset
Elizabeth von Arnim
Margaret Walker
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Mary Webb
Jean Webster
Eudora Welty
Dorothy West
Rebecca West
Edith Wharton
Phillis Wheatley
Antonia White
Margery Williams (Bianco)
Kate Douglas Wiggin
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Woolf
Elinor Wylie
Marguerite Yourcenar