Female first-person literature?

The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall (Gone With the Wind parody from a Black character’s perspective)

Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (The OP specified “literature,” not fiction)

Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner (Not a graphic novel, although it does feature a lot of the comics stories that it was semi-based on)

Book about the Black Plague in England; spoilering the title because it completely gives away the book.

Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is occasionally narrated in first person.

:confused:

Technically. :wink:

The Stephanie Plum novels, by Janet Evanovich, are from the POV of a rather inept female bounty hunter.

Fanny Hill.

:smiley:

Also, Dolores Claiborne. Another male writer who did female 1st person narration, and rather well, was Winston Graham. Marnie was written this way, and IIRC, so was The Walking Stick.

We now know the anti-drug book Go Ask Alice was fake, not a real memoir, but it was written from the point of view of a teenage girl.

Moll Flanders is told first-person in Moll’s voice, iirc.

Slaves of New York is written in first person female. The chapters were originally published as short stories, but they were arranged and edited to make a long narrative, and it worked. It got lukewarm critical reception, but made the NYT bestseller list for several weeks, albeit, it never got above 9, or something. GenX was very young, and was reading it in droves. That generation at that age could relate to staying in a bad relationship because you couldn’t find another place to live.

Just mentioning all that since the OP asked for “famous” literature. This book was pretty famous when it first came out, and would have “trended,” had that existed at the time, even though it’s largely forgotten now.

A couple of other books that are very well know in literary circles (anyone with a degree in English has heard of them), but not famous among the general public, like, say, Gone with the Wind, are Housekeeping, and My Brilliant Career, both of which are written in first person female voices.

Speaking of known-in-literary-circles-anyone-with-a-degree-in-English-has-heard-of novels: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. This book is invariably the first thing mentioned when the topic is Post-Colonial Literature. It’s also one of the earliest books (perhaps the earliest?), like The Wind Done Gone or The Red Tent, to rewrite a classic from the point of view of a supporting character (in this case, a reimagining of Jane Eyre from Bertha’s point of view.

I remember Tama Janowitz was on top of the NY literary world, a regular demigoddess, for one magic year… and then… now… she’d make a great subject for “Where Are They Now?/Whatever Became of…?” or an American Express “Do you know me?” commercial.