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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.

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List of the most influential female people in Literature,

#2601

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.

#2602

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.

#2603

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.

#2604

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.

#2605

Isabel Briggs Myers

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.

#2606

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.

#2607

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.

#2608

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.

#2609

Christine de Pizan

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...

#2610

Lin Huiyin

1904 - 1955 (51 years)

Lin Huiyin was a Chinese architect and writer. She is known to be the first female architect in modern China and her husband is the famed "Father of Modern Chinese Architecture" Liang Sicheng, both of whom worked as founders and faculty in the newly formed Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Liang and Lin began restoration work on cultural heritage sites of China in the post-imperial Republican Era of China, a passion which she would pursue to the end of her life. The American artist Maya Lin is her niec...

#2611

Ouida

1839 - 1908 (69 years)

Maria Louise Ramé , going by the name Marie Louise de la Ramée and known by the pseudonym Ouida , was an English novelist. During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, as well as short stories, children's books and essays. Moderately successful, she lived a life of luxury, entertaining many of the literary figures of the day.

#2612

Táhirih

1817 - 1852 (35 years)

Táhirih As a young girl she was educated privately by her father and showed herself a talented writer. Whilst in her teens she married the son of her uncle, with whom she had a difficult marriage. In the early 1840s she became a follower of Shaykh Ahmad and began a secret correspondence with his successor Kazim Rashti. Táhirih travelled to the Shiʻi holy city of Karbala to meet Kazim Rashti, but he died a number of days before her arrival. In 1844 aged about 27, in search of the Qa'im through the Islamic teachings she figured his whereabouts. Independent to any individual she became acquainted with the teachings of the Báb and accepted his religious claims as Qa'im.

#2613

Radclyffe Hall

1880 - 1943 (63 years)

Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name John, rather than Marguerite.

#2614

Charlotte Mary Yonge

Charlotte Mary Yonge

1823 - 1901 (78 years)

Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.

#2615

Anna Pavlova

1881 - 1931 (50 years)

Anna Pavlovna Pavlova was a Russian prima ballerina of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev. Pavlova is most recognized for her creation of the role of The Dying Swan and, with her own company, became the first ballerina to tour around the world, including performances in South America, India, Mexico and Australia.

#2616

Gabrielle Roy

1909 - 1983 (74 years)

Gabrielle Roy was a Canadian author from St. Boniface, Manitoba and one of the major figures in French Canadian literature. Early life Roy was born in 1909 in Saint-Boniface , Manitoba, and was educated at the Académie Saint-Joseph. She was born into a family of eleven children and reportedly began to write at an early age. She lived on rue Deschambault, a house and neighbourhood in Saint-Boniface that would later inspire one of her most famous works. The house is now a National Historic Site and museum in Winnipeg.

#2617

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.

#2618

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.

#2619

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...

#2620

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.

#2621

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.

#2622

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.

#2623

Margaret Wise Brown

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.

#2624

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 ...

#2625

Anne Bradstreet

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.

#2626

Fredrika Bremer

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.

#2627

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.

#2628

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 .

#2629

Elisabeth of Wied

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.

#2630

Mary Sidney

1561 - 1621 (60 years)

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham's verse miscellany Belvidere. Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel's closet drama Cleopatra and of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra . She was also known for translating Petrarch's "Triumph of Death", for the ...

#2631

Yevgenia Ginzburg

Yevgenia Ginzburg

1904 - 1977 (73 years)

Yevgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg was a Soviet writer who served an 18-year sentence in the Kolyma Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia. Family and early career Born in Moscow, her parents were Solomon Natanovich Ginzburg and Revekka Markovna Ginzburg. The family moved to Kazan in 1909. In 1920, she began to study social sciences at Kazan State University, later switching to pedagogy. She worked as a rabfak teacher. In April 1934, Ginzburg was officially confirmed as a docent , specializing in the history of the All-Union Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, on May 25, she was named head of the new department of the history of Leninism.

#2632

Marjorie Hope Nicolson

1894 - 1981 (87 years)

Marjorie Hope Nicolson was an American literary scholar. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1941 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955. Early life and education Nicolson was the daughter of Charles Butler Nicolson, editor-in-chief of the Detroit Free Press during World War I and later that paper's correspondent in Washington, DC, and Lissie Hope Morris.

#2633

Babette Deutsch

Babette Deutsch

1895 - 1982 (87 years)

Babette Deutsch was an American poet, critic, translator, and novelist. Background Babette Deutsch was born on September 22, 1895, in New York City. Her parents were of Michael Deutsch and Melanie Fisher Deutsch. She matriculated from the Ethical Culture School and Barnard College, graduating in 1917 with a B.A. She published poems in magazines such as the North American Review and the New Republic while she was still a student at Barnard.

#2634

Enid Starkie

1897 - 1970 (73 years)

Enid Mary Starkie CBE , was an Irish literary critic, known for her biographical works on French poets. She was a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and Lecturer and then Reader in the University.

#2635

Christina Stead

Christina Stead

1902 - 1983 (81 years)

Christina Stead was an Australian novelist and short-story writer acclaimed for her satirical wit and penetrating psychological characterisations. Christina Stead was a committed Marxist, although she was never a member of the Communist Party. She spent much of her life outside Australia, although she returned before her death.

#2636

Veronica Forrest-Thomson

1947 - 1975 (28 years)

Veronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016. Life and education Veronica was born in Malaya to a rubber planter, John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean, but grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She opted to hyphenate the surname, having originally been published under the name Veronica Forrest.

#2637

Josephine Johnson

1910 - 1990 (80 years)

Josephine Winslow Johnson was an American novelist, poet, and essayist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1935 at age 24 for her first novel, Now in November. To this day she's the youngest person to win the Pulitzer for Fiction. Shortly thereafter, she published Winter Orchard, a collection of short stories that had previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The St. Louis Review, and Hound & Horn. Of these stories, "Dark" won an O. Henry Award in 1934, and "John the Six" won an O. Henry Award third prize the following year. Johnson continued writing short stories and won three more O.

#2638

Mary Augusta Scott

1851 - 1918 (67 years)

Mary Augusta Scott was a scholar and professor of English at Smith College. She was one of the first women to receive a PhD from Yale University, in 1894. Biography Scott was born in Dayton, Ohio, and received her master's degree at Vassar College. She studied at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, Johns Hopkins University, and Yale University; she earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1894.

#2639

Jacqueline Susann

Jacqueline Susann

1918 - 1974 (56 years)

Jacqueline Susann was an American novelist and actress. Her iconic novel, Valley of the Dolls , is one of the best-selling books in publishing history. With her two subsequent works, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough , Susann became the first author to have three novels top The New York Times Best Seller list consecutively.

#2640

Medea Norsa

1877 - 1952 (75 years)

Medea Vittoria Irma Norsa was an Italian papyrologist and philologist. She headed the Istituto Papirologico Girolamo Vitelli in Florence from 1935 to 1949. Early life and education Norsa was born to Michele Norsa and Silvia Vittoria Krosna in Trieste on 26 August 1877, the oldest of four children. She was christened Medea Vittoria Irma on 16 September 1877. After Silvia's death in 1886, her father married Caterina Giovanna Furlani in 1894 and had three more children.

#2641

Dorothy Fields

1905 - 1974 (69 years)

Dorothy Fields was an American librettist and lyricist. She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicalss and films. Her best-known pieces include "The Way You Look Tonight" , "A Fine Romance" , "On the Sunny Side of the Street" , "Don't Blame Me" , "Pick Yourself Up" , "I'm in the Mood for Love" , "You Couldn't Be Cuter" and "Big Spender" . Throughout her career, she collaborated with various influential figures in the American musical theater, including Jerome Kern, Cy Coleman, Irving Berlin, and Jimmy McHugh. Along with Ann Ronell, Dana Suesse, Bernice Petkere, and Kay Swift, she was one o...

#2642

Catherine Winkworth

Catherine Winkworth

1827 - 1878 (51 years)

Catherine Winkworth was an English hymnwriter and educator. She translated the German chorale tradition of church hymns for English speakers, for which she is recognized in the calendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She also worked for wider educational opportunities for girls, and translated biographies of two founders of religious sisterhoods. When 16, Winkworth appears to have coined a once well-known political pun, peccavi, "I have Sindh", relating to the British occupation of Sindh in colonial India.

#2643

Melpo Axioti

1905 - 1973 (68 years)

Melpo Axioti was a Greek writer who professed to Communism. She wrote in modern Greek. She spent most of her exile from 1947 to 1964, in the German Democratic Republic. Life and work The daughter of musician and composer Georgios Axiotis, she was raised on the Greek island of Mykonos without a mother. From 1918 to 1922 she attended the school of the Ursulines on the island of Tinos. After a short marriage with her theology professor Vassilis Markaris she went to Athens in 1930, where she soon debuted with short stories in the magazine Mykoniatika Chronika. She was one of the pioneers of Greek surrealism.

#2644

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

1623 - 1673 (50 years)

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a prolific English philosopher, poet, scientist, fiction writer and playwright. In her lifetime she produced more than 12 original literary works, many of which became well known due to her high social status. This high social status allowed Margaret to meet and converse with some of the most important and influential minds of her time.

#2645

Margaret Verrall

1857 - 1916 (59 years)

Margaret de Gaudrion Verrall was a classical scholar and lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge. Much of her life and research was concerned with the study of parapsychology, mainly in order to examine how psychic abilities might demonstrate the abilities, breadth and power of the human mind. She began to exhibit and develop psychic abilities herself around 1901, and became both a recipient and analyst of many cross-correspondences produced by psychics, most notably the Palm Sunday scripts.

#2646

Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates

1863 - 1929 (66 years)

Katharine Lee Bates was an American author and poet, chiefly remembered for her anthem "America the Beautiful", but also for her many books and articles on social reform, on which she was a noted speaker.

#2647

Caroline Ransom Williams

Caroline Ransom Williams

1872 - 1952 (80 years)

Caroline Ransom Williams was an Egyptologist and classical archaeologist. She was the first American woman to be professionally trained as an Egyptologist. She worked extensively with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other major institutions with Egyptian collections, and published Studies in ancient furniture , The Tomb of Perneb , and The Decoration of the Tomb of Perneb: The Technique and the Color Conventions , among others. During the Epigraphic Survey of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's first season in Luxor, she helped to develop the "Chicago House method" ...

#2648

Julia Irvine

1848 - 1930 (82 years)

Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine was the fourth president of Wellesley College, serving from 1894 to 1899. Irvine was the daughter of Indiana suffragist Mary M. Thomas. A Cornell University graduate, she came to Wellesley College as a professor of Greek in 1890. During her tenure as Wellesley president, she enacted a number of reforms and eliminated some of the rules for students such as silent time, domestic work, the prohibition on Sunday library hours and mandatory Chapel attendance. She replaced several professors, especially those without advanced degrees, as part of an overhaul of academic...

#2649

Viola S. Wendt

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Viola Sophia Wendt was an American poet and educator. Early life and education Wendt was born into a farming family in Boise, Idaho, in March 1907, the first of two daughters of Carl Wendt. Her parents moved to West Bend, Wisconsin in 1914 in order for her father to pursue new business opportunities. Viola was educated there, graduating from West Bend High School in 1924. She was a bright student, especially excelling at languages, writing, and literary analysis. Accordingly, Wendt entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison , majoring in English Literature. During her time there as an und...

#2650

Sophie Jewett

1861 - 1909 (48 years)

Sophie Jewett , also known under the pseudonym Ellen Burroughs, was an American lyric poet, translator, and professor at Wellesley College. Much of her poetry contains lesbian themes. Family Jewett was born in Moravia, New York, one of four children of Charles Carroll Jewett, a doctor, and Ellen Ransom Jewett. Her mother died when she was 7 and her father when she was 9, after which she was raised by an uncle, Daniel Burroughs, and her grandmother in Buffalo. Her sister Louise became a noted art historian. In Buffalo, she developed a friendship with Mary Whiton Calkins, the daughter of her mi...

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