In reply, @neurotaylor and I have devised an alternative, all-female list, which I append. (The women/texts in red are those also mentioned by McCrum.) Not all the women included on the list are English and Julian of Norwich, our first inclusion, predates McCrum's first 'moment' (the death of Christopher Marlowe) by 200 years. Our list is not intended to be like-for-like. Nonetheless, it makes a point.
Update: 12 February. Robert McCrum has now published a new list, consisting entirely of women writers. It's generated some comment, which is great to see. No list is ever going to please everyone, and there have been many more than 50 important books by women over the centuries. Further suggestions very gratefully received!
1. Julian
of Norwich: Sixteen
Revelations of Divine Love (c. 1393; thought to be the first book written in
English by a woman)
2. Christine
de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies
(1405; this courtly French poet wrote about women’s roles and emphasized their
positive contributions to society)
3. Margery
Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe (1436; women can do autobiography)
4. Mary
Sidney: Psalms (c. 1599; her paraphrases of the Psalms were as good as or
better than her brother Philip’s)
5. Margaret
Cavendish: The Blazing World (1666; women can do science-fiction, long before
that term was invented)
6. Lucy
Hutchinson: The Life of Colonel Hutchinson (c. 1673; women can do biography)
7. Anne
Bradstreet: Severall Poems (1678; Bradstreet is often called ‘the first
American poet’)
8. Aphra
Behn: Oroonoko (1688; pioneering playwright and poet who showed that women can
make a living from writing)
9. Mary
Astell: A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694; Astell advocated a university
for women)
10. Anne Finch:
The Spleen (1701; a pioneer woman writer on mental illness)
11. Charlotte
Lennox: The Female Quixote (1752; women can do satire)
12. Elizabeth
Carter: All the Works of Epictetus (1758; women can translate the classics)
13. Mary
Wortley-Montagu: The Turkish Embassy Letters (c. 1761; women can do travel
writing)
14. Catherine
Macaulay: The History of England (1763-1783; women can do history)
15. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792)
16. Ann
Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794; women can do Gothic fiction)
17. Maria
Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent (1800; invents the regional novel in English)
18. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813)
19. Mary
Shelley: Frankenstein (1818; women can do enduring horror stories)
20. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning: The Cry of the Children (1842; this poem helped bring about
reforms to child labour in England)
21. Emily Brontë: Wuthering
Heights (1847)
22. Charlotte
Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847; set the pattern for many a romantic novel)
23. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
24. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1855)
25. Florence Nightingale: Notes
on Nursing (1859; women can do medicine)
26. Mrs Beeton:
The Book of Household Management (1861; women can do really popular cookery
books)
27. Julia Ward
Howe: The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861; women can do political propaganda)
28. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)
29. Edith
Sitwell: Façade (1922-3; women can do surrealism)
30. Emily
Dickinson: Complete Poems (1924; women can do poetry)
31. Virginia
Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (1929; women can be revolutionaries)
32. Vera
Brittain: Testament of Youth (1933; women can do war memoirs)
33. Agatha
Christie: Murder on the Orient Express (1934; women can do detective fiction,
and how)
34. Rebecca
West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941; women can do travel writing)
35. Simone de
Beauvoir: The Second Sex (1949; women can do philosophy)
36. Iris Murdoch:
Under the Net (1954; this prolific philosopher-novelist showed how varied a
woman’s writing can be)
37. Rachel Carson: Silent Spring (1962; pioneering and vastly influential work of environmentalism)
38. Doris
Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962; women can chronicle political and social
change)
39. Sylvia
Plath: The Bell Jar (1963; women can write starkly about mental illness)
40. Germaine
Greer: The Female
Eunuch (1970;
feminist bestseller)
41. Angela
Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1979; women can do dark things with fairy tales)
42. Margaret
Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985; women can do dystopian fiction)
43. Jeanette
Winterson: Oranges
are Not the Only Fruit (1985; lesbian fiction goes mainstream)
44. Toni
Morrison: Beloved (1987; women can reshape American fiction)
45. Pat Barker:
Regeneration (1991; women can do war fiction)
46. Kay
Redfield Jamison: An Unquiet Mind (1995; women can do psychiatry)
47. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
48. Catherine
Millet: The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2002; women can write explicitly about
sex)
49. EL James:
50 Shades of Grey (2012; women can do soft as well as hard porn)
50. Hilary
Mantel: Bring up the Bodies (2012; women can win prizes. Even the Booker.
Twice.)
