January 2023
In 2016, Andrew Kahn and Rebecca Onion analyzed the gender imbalance in authors of popular history books for Slate and found that roughly three-quarters of them were men. Last year, Johanna Thomas-Curr averred in The Observer that women are dominating fiction in terms of prizes and hype. For readers who are interested in both history and discovering new books by female authors, the solution is simple: explore the past through the following historical novels by women.
Many of the novels below feature real-life characters while some just recreate past epochs and their radical shifts, yet in all of them, women emerge from history’s sidelines. They fight, work, make hard decisions, and strike out to new countries or continents. But in the stories of these nine authors, history is made through private moments of love, creativity, and mourning as much as widely noted acts of bravado and defiance.