Introduction to the collection
Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
4,300 years of women building a literature around the apparatus designed to prevent it
For most of human history, women were not supposed to write. They were denied education, denied publication, denied the room of their own that makes sustained thought possible. Some wrote anyway -- under pseudonyms, in secret, in languages their censors dismissed, in forms that looked like something else. This collection is about what they made, and what it cost them to make it.
The span runs from Sei Shonagon's pillow book in tenth-century Japan to Margaret Atwood's Gilead in the 1980s. The barriers were different in every century and every culture: legal prohibition, social ridicule, economic dependence, physical danger. The strategies were equally varied: concealment, defiance, patronage, privilege, sheer persistence. Each entry tells a different story about what happens when talent meets prohibition.
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Published
22 of 57 published. Last updated 13 September 2026.
Sei ShΕnagon: The Pillow Book (c. 1002) β A Heian court lady's private lists, grudges, and delights.
Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962) β A writer keeps four notebooks to hold a life that will not stay whole.
Charlotte BrontΓ«: Jane Eyre (1847) β A governess insists on being met as an equal.
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985) β A fertile woman is conscripted into a theocracy's breeding programme.
Anne BrontΓ«: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) β A wife leaves her alcoholic husband and earns her own living.
Kate Chopin: The Awakening (1899) β A Louisiana wife discovers she wants a life of her own.
Nella Larsen: Passing (1929) β Two Black women who could pass as white meet again in Harlem.
Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias (c. 1151) β A German abbess sets down twenty-six visions and what they mean.
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818) β A student builds a man out of corpses, then abandons him.
Anna Akhmatova: Requiem (1963) β Poems from the prison queues of Leningrad, memorised because paper was unsafe.
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) β A Black woman in Florida marries three times and finally chooses for herself.
Aphra Behn: Oroonoko (1688) β An enslaved African prince in Surinam, by the first Englishwoman to live by her pen.
Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions (1988) β A Rhodesian girl bargains for the education handed to her brother.
Mariama BΓ’: So Long a Letter (1979) β A Senegalese widow writes to her oldest friend about the second wife.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) β Biafra's war seen from inside one professor's household.
Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent): Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) β Seven years hidden in a crawlspace to stay near her children.
Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) β The case that women are rational beings, written in six weeks.
Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (1868β1869) β Four sisters grow up in wartime Massachusetts, and Jo refuses the expected marriage.
Octavia E. Butler: Kindred (1979) β A Black writer is pulled from 1976 California to a Maryland plantation.
Ismat Chughtai: Lihaaf (The Quilt, ΩΨΨ§Ω) (December 1942) β A short story about two women under a quilt that put its author on trial.
Alejandra Pizarnik: Extracting the Stone of Madness (ExtracciΓ³n de la piedra de locura) (1968) β Poems written at the edge of what language will still hold.
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) β A physicist travels from an anarchist moon back to the world it fled.
Coming Soon
Gwendolyn Brooks: Annie Allen (1949) β One Black woman's life in Chicago, in verse that took the Pulitzer. (18 September 2026)
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (Het Achterhuis) (1947) β Two years in an Amsterdam annexe, by a girl who did not survive it. (25 September 2026)
Forugh Farrokhzad: Another Birth (1964) β Persian poems of desire by a woman her country tried to shout down. (2 October 2026)
Enheduanna: The Exaltation of Inanna (c. 2300 BCE) β The first author in history to sign a name, and the name was hers. (9 October 2026)
Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls (c. 1290) β A book of mystical love, burned in Paris along with the woman who wrote it. (16 October 2026)
Christine de Pizan: The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) β A woman builds an allegorical city from every great woman before her. (23 October 2026)
Ama Ata Aidoo: Our Sister Killjoy (1977) β A Ghanaian student in Europe declines to be grateful. (30 October 2026)
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927) β A family, a house by the sea, and ten years passing in a single paragraph. (6 November 2026)
Buchi Emecheta: The Joys of Motherhood (1979) β 13 November 2026
Clarice Lispector: The Passion According to G.H. (1964) β 20 November 2026
George Sand: Indiana (1832) β 27 November 2026
Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun (1959) β 4 December 2026
β¦and 23 more to come.
22 down. 35 to go. New posts every Saturday.
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The Readings
50 books
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Gossips From the Heian Court β The Pillow Book
Sei ShΕnagon β The Pillow Book
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Four Notebooks and a Fifth β The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing β The Golden Notebook
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Published as 'Currer Bell' Because the Passion Was Assumed a Man's β Jane Eyre
Charlotte BrontΓ« β Jane Eyre
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She Only Used Things That Had Already Happened β The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood β The Handmaid's Tale
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A Wife Fled Her Drunkard Husband β The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne BrontΓ« β The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
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A Wife Noticed She Was a Person and the World Could Not Forgive Her β The Awakening
Kate Chopin β The Awakening
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She Wrote a Novel About Silence and Then Was Silenced β Passing
Nella Larsen β Passing
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A Twelfth-Century Nun Who Heard Music from God β Scivias
Hildegard of Bingen β Scivias
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She Was 18 and She Invented Science Fiction β Frankenstein
Mary Shelley β Frankenstein
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Memorised by Friends Because Paper Was Too Dangerous β Requiem
Anna Akhmatova β Requiem
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She Wrote Her Own Pear Tree β Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston β Their Eyes Were Watching God
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The First Professional Woman Writer in English β Oroonoko
Aphra Behn β Oroonoko
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Zimbabwe Didn't Want This Published β Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga β Nervous Conditions
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Forty Days to Find Her Voice β So Long a Letter
Mariama BΓ’ β So Long a Letter
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She Inherited a War as Silence β Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie β Half of a Yellow Sun
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Seven Years in a Crawlspace, a Century Before the Canon β Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet Jacobs β Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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Six Weeks That Founded Anglophone Feminism β A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft β A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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Jo March Refused the Suitor She Was Supposed to Marry β Little Women
Louisa May Alcott β Little Women
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She Lost the Arm Where History Held On β Kindred
Octavia E. Butler β Kindred
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What Moved Under the Quilt the Raj Could Not Name β Lihaaf
Ismat Chughtai β Lihaaf (The Quilt)
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She Wrote What We Were Afraid to Write β Extracting the Stone of Madness
Alejandra Pizarnik β Extracting the Stone of Madness
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She Broke the Wall Between Worlds β The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin β The Dispossessed
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She Gave Black Women's Lives the Highest Form and Dared Anyone to Look Away β Annie Allen
Gwendolyn Brooks β Annie Allen
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The Notebook Survived. The Empire Did Not. β The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank β The Diary of a Young Girl
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She Lost the Child. Then She Found the Voice. β Another Birth
Forugh Farrokhzad β Another Birth
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The First Author Was a Priestess β The Exaltation of Inanna
Enheduanna β The Exaltation of Inanna
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She Was Burned. Her Words Learned to Survive Without Her. β The Mirror of Simple Souls
Marguerite Porete β The Mirror of Simple Souls
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She Built a City Because the Library Had Become a Siege. β The Book of the City of Ladies
Christine de Pizan β The Book of the City of Ladies
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She Went to Europe and Refused to Be Grateful. β Our Sister Killjoy
Ama Ata Aidoo β Our Sister Killjoy
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She Made Consciousness the Plot β To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf β To the Lighthouse
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She Wrote the View from Inside the Compound β The Joys of Motherhood
Buchi Emecheta β The Joys of Motherhood
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She Looked at the Cockroach and Lost Everything β The Passion According to G.H.
Clarice Lispector β The Passion According to G.H.
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Her Husband Owned Everything Except Her Soul β Indiana
George Sand β Indiana
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She Wrote the Play Broadway Said a Black Woman Couldn't Write β A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry β A Raisin in the Sun
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Walled In, She Wrote the First Book in English by a Woman β Revelations of Divine Love
Julian of Norwich β Revelations of Divine Love
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She Stayed and Bore Witness While They Banned Her Books β Burger's Daughter
Nadine Gordimer β Burger's Daughter
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She Burned Her First Novel at Fifteen, Then Invented the Room Austen Would Furnish β Evelina
Fanny Burney β Evelina
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She Named What No One Was Supposed to Name β Woman at Point Zero
Nawal El Saadawi β Woman at Point Zero
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The Song That Outlasts the Cage β I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou β I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
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The Walls Do Not Fall β Trilogy
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) β Trilogy
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Her Only Novel Was So Ferocious They Assumed a Man Had Written It β Wuthering Heights
Emily BrontΓ« β Wuthering Heights
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She Wrote About Children Becoming What the World Had Already Decided They Would Be β Takekurabe
Higuchi IchiyΕ β Takekurabe (Child's Play)
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She Took a Thousand Pages to Prove That 'Woman' Was an Invention β The Second Sex
Simone de Beauvoir β The Second Sex
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She Answered a Bishop Disguised as a Nun and Lost Everything but the Argument β Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz
Sor Juana InΓ©s de la Cruz β Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz
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The Women's Hand β The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu β The Tale of Genji
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The Inquisition Took Her Book. She Wrote a Better One. β The Interior Castle
Teresa of Γvila β The Interior Castle
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Nine Books Burned. These Fragments Survived. β If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Sappho β If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
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She Wrote Like Someone Who Had Swallowed Fire β Selected Poems
Marina Tsvetaeva β Selected Poems
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The Growing Good of the World β Middlemarch
George Eliot β Middlemarch
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Eighteen Gentlemen Had to Agree She Could Think β Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Phillis Wheatley β Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral