She does narrate at least one chapter, and it reveals some pretty crucial information, as I recall.
I don’t know if it counts as famous anymore but you can’t get any more first person or female than Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield, which I recommend unreservedly to anyone who wants a look into 1930s England and appreciates a sharp dry wit. It is the literary grandmother to Bridget Jones’s Diary (also female and first person and definitely famous)
The Cecelia and Kate novels are almost exclusively written in female first person. They’re written as the collected letters of a pair of woman friends in an alternate universe; the first book actually started out as a “Letter Game” between the two authors they decided was good enough to clean up and publish.
Patricia Wrede’s Frontier Magic trilogy is also written in first person perspective. The protagonist is a girl/young woman in an alternate America where magic is more common than technology, where there were never any Indians but are instead vast numbers of fantastical monsters and no one has ever crossed the Rocky Mountains alive.
Addie narrates chapter 40.
There are at least two other female characters–Dewey Dell Bundren and Cora Tull–who also narrate a few chapters each.
Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons (famous?) narrated by a young girl.
All but one of the Little House series are from Laura’s POV, aren’t they?
If I remember correctly, they are from Laura’s point of view, but are written in the third person rather than the first person.
Obviously many years of leaves have fallen since American Lit class.
The Spy Who Loved Me is unique among Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels for being first person, through the eyes of a young French-Canadian woman who only meets Bond in the later chapters.
A quick scan through my last few years of books on Goodreads:
The Fault In Our Stars - John Green
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Big Brother - Lionel Shriver
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Among Others - Jo Watson
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
All The Birds, Singing - Evie Wyld
Kindred - Octavia E Butler
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
Also, half the chapters of:
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
The Collector - John Fowles
I was going to suggest Robert J. Sawyer’s trilogy, WWW (Wake, Wonder Watch). The first book, especially, is an excellent first person young blind woman’s account.
Compromising Positions by Susan Isaacs and a couple other novels by her feature Judith Singer bored housewife turned detective.
“Eve’s Diary,” short story by Mark Twain.
Addie Pray by Joe David Brown. The basis of the movie Paper Moon. Addie’s adventures are more, and more varied than the movie’s. A fun read.
Kitty Foyle by Christopher Morley. The basis of the movie. Kitty is friskier in the book. Another good read.
a page-turner with 222,748 goodreads ratings and 9,995 reviews (compared to 915,911 ratings and 23,061 reviews for Jane Eyre). I saw the movie version of Rebecca as a Classics Illustrated version of the novel, with some key plot points changed due to US movie censorship. Anyway, for anyone with more than one lifetime available for reading, there is of course also male first-person literature written by women.
You’re quite right, I remembered wrong. My penance was staying up past two to finish the book I’d opened to doublecheck.
Poison Study - Maria V Snyder has a female protagonist
(followed by Magic Study & Fire Study)
She never says anything while she’s alive, but a chapter that appears AFTER her death was narrated by the mother… and she reveals herself as a pretty horrible person.
And a few chapters are narrated by her teenage daughter, who thinks she’s pregnant and is seeking some kind of abortifacient.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.
Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler.
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown.
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters.
Thérèse et Isabelle by Violette Leduc.
Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain.
Madras on Rainy Days by Samina Ali.
A pair of YA novels by Juliet Marillier that make good reading for grownups too are *Wildwood Dancing *and its companion book Cybele’s Secret.
I just remembered a good one: Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin. Gives the *Aeneid * a similar treatment to what The Red Tent did for the Book of Genesis.