The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Literature,
#2501
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
1689 - 1762 (73 years)
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English aristocrat, writer, and poet. Born in 1689, Lady Mary spent her early life in England. In 1712, Lady Mary married Edward Wortley Montagu, who later served as the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Lady Mary joined her husband on the Ottoman excursion, where she was to spend the next two years of her life. During her time there, Lady Mary wrote extensively on her experience as a woman in Ottoman Constantinople. After her return to England, Lady Mary devoted her attention to the upbringing of her family before dying of cancer in 1762.
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Clarice Lispector
1920 - 1977 (57 years)
Clarice Lispector was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovative, idiosyncratic works explore a variety of narrative styles with themes of intimacy and introspection, and have subsequently been internationally acclaimed. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.
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Madame d'Aulnoy
1652 - 1705 (53 years)
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French author known for her literary fairy tales. When she termed her works contes de fées , she originated the term that is now generally used for the genre.
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Maria Edgeworth
1768 - 1849 (81 years)
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her firs...
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Grazia Deledda
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
Grazia Maria Cosima Damiana Deledda , also known in Sardinian language as Gràssia or Gràtzia Deledda , was an Italian writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 "for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island [i.e. Sardinia] and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general". She was the first Italian woman to receive the prize, and only the second woman in general after Selma Lagerlöf was awarded hers in 1909.
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Carson McCullers
1917 - 1967 (50 years)
Carson McCullers was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter , explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the Deep South.
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Felicia Hemans
1793 - 1835 (42 years)
Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet . Two of her opening lines, "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "The stately homes of England", have acquired classic status. Early life and education Felicia Dorothea Browne was the daughter of George Browne, who worked for his father-in-law's wine importing business and succeeded him as Tuscan and imperial consul in Liverpool, and Felicity, daughter of Benedict Paul Wagner , wine importer at 9 Wolstenholme Square, Liverpool and Venetian consul for that city. Hemans was the fourth of six children to survive infancy. Her sister Harriett collaborated musically with Hemans and later edited her complete works .
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Anne Brontë
1820 - 1849 (29 years)
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, and the youngest member of the Brontë literary family. Anne Brontë was the daughter of Maria and Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England. Anne lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire moors. Otherwise, she attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837, and between 1839 and 1845 lived elsewhere working as a governess. In 1846 she published a book of poems with her sisters and later two novels, initially under the pen name Acton Bell. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 at the same time as Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily Brontë.
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Anna Seghers
1900 - 1983 (83 years)
Anna Seghers , is the pseudonym of a German writer notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City .
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Joanna Baillie
1762 - 1851 (89 years)
Joanna Baillie was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as Plays on the Passions and Fugitive Verses She was critically acclaimed in her lifetime, and while living in Hampstead, associated with contemporary writers such as Anna Barbauld, Lucy Aikin, and Walter Scott. She died at the age of 88.
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Nancy Cunard
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Nancy Clara Cunard was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader V. K. Krishna Menon.
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Stevie Smith
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith , was an English poet and novelist. She won the Cholmondeley Award and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. A play, Stevie by Hugh Whitemore, based on her life, was adapted into a film starring Glenda Jackson.
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Miles Franklin
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin , known as Miles Franklin, was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
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Isabel Briggs Myers
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Isabel Briggs Myers was an American writer who co-created the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator with her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs. The MBTI is one of the most-often used personality tests worldwide; over two million people complete the questionnaire each year.
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Vicki Baum
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Hedwig "Vicki" Baum was an Austrian writer. She is known for the novel Menschen im Hotel , one of her first international successes. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 Broadway musical. Education and personal life Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Her mother Mathilde suffered from mental illness, and died of breast cancer when Vicki was still a child. Her father, described as "a tyrannical, hypochondriac" man, was a bank clerk who was killed in 1942 in Novi Sad by soldiers of the Hungarian occupation. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in the Vienna Concert Society.
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Vera Brittain
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Vera Mary Brittain was an English Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, writer, feminist, socialist and pacifist. Her best-selling 1933 memoir Testament of Youth recounted her experiences during the First World War and the beginning of her journey towards pacifism.
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Edna Ferber
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big , Show Boat , Cimarron , Giant and Ice Palace , which also received a film adaptation in 1960. She helped adapt her short story "Old Man Minick", published in 1922, into a play and it was thrice adapted to film, in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Eleanor Farjeon
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Eleanor Farjeon was an English author of children's stories and plays, poetry, biography, history and satire. Several of her works had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. Some of her correspondence has also been published. She won many literary awards and the Eleanor Farjeon Award for children's literature is presented annually in her memory by the Children's Book Circle, a society of publishers. She was the sister of thriller writer Joseph Jefferson Farjeon.
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Johanna Spyri
1827 - 1901 (74 years)
Johanna Louise Spyri was a Swiss author of novels, notably children's stories. She wrote the popular book Heidi. Born in Hirzel, a rural area in the canton of Zürich, as a child she spent several summers near Chur in Graubünden, the setting she later would use in her novels.
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Zenta Mauriņa
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Zenta Mauriņa was a Latvian writer, essayist, translator, and researcher in philology. She was married to the Electronic Voice Phenomena researcher Konstantin Raudive. Biography Born to doctor Roberts Mauriņš, Zenta spent her childhood in Grobiņa, where, at the age of six, she contracted polio, leaving her confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. After studying at the Russian girl's high school in Liepaja , she studied philosophy at the Latvian University in Riga . After this, she studied philology of Baltic languages . She taught at the Latvian Teachers Institute and at the Latvian...
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Frances Burney
1752 - 1840 (88 years)
Frances Burney , also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina , was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded. Most of her plays were not performed in her lifetime.
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Lady Caroline Lamb
1785 - 1828 (43 years)
Lady Caroline Lamb was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and novelist, best known for Glenarvon, a Gothic novel. In 1812, she had an affair with Lord Byron, whom she described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Her husband was the Honourable William Lamb, who after her death became 2nd Viscount Melbourne and British prime minister.
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Fannie Hurst
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Fannie Hurst was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst also actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.
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Chen Hengzhe
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Chen Hengzhe , pen name Sophia H. Z. Chen , was a pioneering writer in modern vernacular Chinese literature, a leader in the New Culture Movement, and the first female professor at a Chinese university. Chen is known for aiming to educate Chinese people by incorporating values from both Western culture and Chinese culture, producing many works reflecting these values.
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Kamini Roy
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Kamini Roy was a Bengali poet, social worker and feminist in British India. She was the first woman honours graduate in British India. Early life Born on 12 October 1864 in the village of Basunda, then in Bakerganj District of Bengal Presidency and now in Jhalokati District of Bangladesh, Roy joined Bethune School in 1883. One of the first girls to attend school in British India, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Sanskrit honours from Bethune College of the University of Calcutta in 1886 and started teaching there in the same year. Kadambini Ganguly, the country's second female honour...
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Helen Gardner
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Dame Helen Louise Gardner, was an English literary critic and academic. Gardner began her teaching career at the University of Birmingham, and from 1966 to 1975 was a Merton Professor of English Literature, the first woman to have that position. She was best known for her work on the poets John Donne and T. S. Eliot, but also published on John Milton and William Shakespeare. She published over a dozen books, and received multiple honours.
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Gladys Mitchell
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell was an English writer best known for her creation of Mrs Bradley, the heroine of 66 detective novels. She also wrote under the pseudonyms Stephen Hockaby and Malcolm Torrie. Fêted during her life , her work has been largely neglected in the decades since her death.
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Sara Teasdale
1884 - 1933 (49 years)
Sara Teasdale was an American lyric poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger after her marriage in 1914. In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs.
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Margaret Wise Brown
1910 - 1952 (42 years)
Margaret Wise Brown was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Anne Bradstreet
1612 - 1672 (60 years)
Anne Bradstreet was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously.
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Fredrika Bremer
1801 - 1865 (64 years)
Fredrika Bremer was a Finnish-born Swedish writer and reformer. Her Sketches of Everyday Life were wildly popular in Britain and the United States during the 1840s and 1850s and she is regarded as the Swedish Jane Austen, bringing the realist novel to prominence in Swedish literature. In her late 30s, she successfully petitioned King Charles XIV for emancipation from her brother's wardship; in her 50s, her novel Hertha prompted a social movement that granted all unmarried Swedish women legal majority at the age of 25 and established Högre Lärarinneseminariet, Sweden's first female tertiary school.
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Mary Gilmore
1865 - 1962 (97 years)
Dame Mary Jean Gilmore was an Australian writer and journalist known for her prolific contributions to Australian literature and the broader national discourse. She wrote both prose and poetry. Gilmore was born in rural New South Wales, and spent her childhood in and around the Riverina, living both in small bush settlements and in larger country towns like Wagga Wagga. Gilmore qualified as a schoolteacher at the age of 16, and after a period in the country was posted to Sydney. She involved herself with the burgeoning labour movement, and she also became a devotee of the utopian socialism views of William Lane.
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Dodie Smith
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
Dorothy Gladys "Dodie" Smith was an English novelist and playwright. She is best known for writing I Capture the Castle and the children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians . Other works include Dear Octopus and The Starlight Barking . The Hundred and One Dalmatians was adapted into a 1961 animated film and a 1996 live-action film, both produced by Disney. Her novel I Capture the Castle was adapted into a 2003 film. I Capture the Castle was voted number 82 as "one of the nation's 100 best-loved novels" by the British public as part of the BBC's The Big Read .
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Elisabeth of Wied
1843 - 1916 (73 years)
Elisabeth of Wied was the first queen of Romania as the wife of King Carol I from 15 March 1881 to 27 September 1914. She had been the princess consort of Romania since her marriage to then-Prince Carol on 15 November 1869.
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Baroness Orczy
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Baroness Emma Orczy , usually known as Baroness Orczy or to her family and friends as Emmuska Orczy, was a Hungarian-born British novelist and playwright. She is best known for her series of novels featuring the Scarlet Pimpernel, the alter ego of Sir Percy Blakeney, a wealthy English fop who turns into a quick-thinking escape artist in order to save French aristocrats from "Madame Guillotine" during the French Revolution, establishing the "hero with a secret identity" in popular culture.
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Ling Shuhua
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Ling Shuhua , also known as Su-hua Ling Chen after her marriage, was a Chinese modernist writer and painter whose short stories became popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Her work is characterized by her use of symbolism and boudoir literature.
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Tamara Karsavina
1885 - 1978 (93 years)
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina was a Russian prima ballerina, renowned for her beauty, who was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and later of the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. After settling in Britain at Hampstead in London, she began teaching ballet professionally and became recognised as one of the founders of modern British ballet. She assisted in the establishment of The Royal Ballet and was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Dance, which is now the world's largest dance-teaching organisation.
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Marie Taglioni
1804 - 1884 (80 years)
Marie Taglioni, Comtesse de Voisins was a Swedish-born ballet dancer of the Romantic ballet era partially of Italian descent, a central figure in the history of European dance. She spent most of her life in the Austrian Empire and France. She was one of the most celebrated ballerinas of the romantic ballet, which was cultivated primarily at Her Majesty's Theatre in London and at the Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique of the Paris Opera Ballet. She is credited with being the first ballerina to truly dance en pointe.
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Hwang Jini
1506 - 1544 (38 years)
Hwang Jini or Hwang Jin-yi , also known by her gisaeng name Myeongwol , was one of the most famous gisaeng of the Joseon Dynasty. She lived during the reign of King Jungjong. She was noted for her exceptional beauty, charming quick wit, extraordinary intellect, and her assertive and independent nature. She has become an almost myth-like figure in modern Korea, inspiring novels, operas, films, and television series.
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Zona Gale
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Zona Gale , also known by her married name, Zona Gale Breese, was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. The close relationship she had with her parents set the tone for her writing and her personal life. Her books based upon her home town were found to be charming and had an intimate sense of realism, in which she captures the underlying feelings and motivations of her characters. All of her works were written under her maiden name, Zona Gale.
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Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Jean Stafford
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970. Biography She was born in Covina, California, to Mary Ethel and John Richard Stafford, a Western pulp writer. As a youth Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and, with friend James Robert Hightower, won a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936 to 1937.
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Julia de Burgos
1914 - 1953 (39 years)
Julia de Burgos García was a Puerto Rican poet. As an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, she served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was also a civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers.
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Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and his only child with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt. Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican Party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Borah.
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Sally Benson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sally Benson was an American writer of short stories and screenwriter. She is best known for her humorous tales of modern youth collected in Junior Miss and her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis.
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Kate L. Turabian
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Kate Ledgerwood Turabian was an Armenian-American educator who is best known for her book A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. In 2018, the University of Chicago Press published the 9th edition of the book. The University of Chicago Press estimates that the various editions of this book have sold more than 9 million copies since its publication in 1937. A 2016 analysis of over one million college course syllabi found that Turabian was the most commonly assigned female author due to this book.
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Lillian Hellman
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belon...
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Pamela Hansford Johnson
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Pamela Hansford Johnson, Baroness Snow, was an English novelist, playwright, poet, literary and social critic. Life Johnson was born in London. Her mother, Amy Clotilda Howson, was a singer and actress, from a theatrical family. Her mother's father, C E Howson, worked for the London Lyceum Company, as Sir Henry Irving's Treasurer. Her father, Reginald Kenneth Johnson, was a colonial civil servant who spent much of his life working in Nigeria. Her father died when she was 11 years old, leaving debts. Her mother earned a living as a typist. Until Pamela was 22, the family lived at 53 Battersea...
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