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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,

#2701

Ruth Bellamy

1906 - 1969 (63 years)

Ruth Bellamy , also known as Ruth Bellamy Brownwood, was an American writer, a journalist, dramatist, songwriter, actress, and poet, based in North Carolina and Japan. Early life and education Ruth Elizabeth Bellamy was born in Enfield, North Carolina, the daughter of Phesington Sugg Bellamy and Lula Spruill Bellamy. Her father was a businessman. Her mother, known as "Mamee", was a well-known social figure in Rocky Mount in her later years.

#2702

Fanny Brice

1891 - 1951 (60 years)

Fania Borach , known professionally as Fanny Brice or Fannie Brice, was an American comedian, illustrated song model, singer, and actress who made many stage, radio, and film appearances. She is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series The Baby Snooks Show.

#2703

Viola Brothers Shore

1890 - 1970 (80 years)

Viola Brothers Shore was an American author who worked in a variety of mediums from the 1910s through the 1930s. Married three times, she began her writing career as a poet and a writer of short stories and articles or magazines. Toward the end of the silent film era, she began writing screenplays, and eventually expanded into theatrical plays and novels. Her daughter, Wilma Shore, was also a successful writer.

#2704

H. B. Goodwin

1827 - 1893 (66 years)

Hannah Elizabeth Bradbury Goodwin Talcott was an American novelist, poet and educator from Maine who resided in Boston for many years. She wrote under various pen names, including H. B., H. E. B., H. B. G., Mrs. H. B. Goodwin, and Mrs. Goodwin-Talcott.

#2705

Mabel Normand

1892 - 1930 (38 years)

Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...

#2706

Barbara P. McCarthy

Barbara P. McCarthy

1904 - 1988 (84 years)

Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire. Education McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A.

#2707

Worth Tuttle Hedden

1896 - 1985 (89 years)

Worth Tuttle Hedden was an American writer who released four books between the 1940s and 1950s. Of her works, Wives of High Pasture became available in 1944 while The Other Room came out in 1947. The following year,The Other Room received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. After publishing Love is a Wound in 1952, Two and Three Make One was made public in 1956 under her pen name Winifred Woodley. Apart from books, Tuttle wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica between 1927 and 1928 while also writing for magazines such as The World Tomorrow. She advocated for civil rights. She won a Sou...

#2708

Judy Canova

1913 - 1983 (70 years)

Judy Canova , born Juliette Canova , was an American comedienne, actress, singer, and radio personality. She appeared on Broadway and in films. She hosted her own self-titled network radio program, a popular series broadcast from 1943 to 1955.

#2709

Dorothy Thursby-Pelham

1884 - 1972 (88 years)

Dorothy Elizabeth Thursby-Pelham was a scientist at the Zoological Laboratory, University of Cambridge and subsequently at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food - Directorate of Fisheries laboratory in Lowestoft who has been called 'England's first female sea-going fisheries scientist' and was an active member of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea .

#2710

Virgínia Rau

1907 - 1973 (66 years)

Virgínia de Bivar Robertes Rau was a Portuguese archaeologist and historian. She was an expert on Portuguese and Portuguese colonial history and author of many history books. She was the daughter of Luís Rau, Jr. of German descent, and his wife Matilde de Bivar de Paula Robertes of Spanish descent, who married in Lisbon in 1902. She enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in 1927, but the following year went aboard, where she attended several courses including at the University of Toulouse. In 1939, due to the beginning of the Second World War, she returned to Lisbon, where she joined the Historical and Philosophical Sciences of the Faculty of Arts.

#2711

Roslyn Brogue

1919 - 1981 (62 years)

Roslyn Brogue was an American pianist, violinist, music educator, classics scholar, poet, author and composer. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1937, from Radcliffe College in 1943 and from Harvard University in 1947 with a Ph.D.

#2712

Cornelia Meigs

1884 - 1973 (89 years)

Cornelia Lynde Meigs was an American writer of fiction and biography for children, teacher of English and writing, historian and critic of children's literature. She won the Newbery Medal for her 1933 biography of Louisa May Alcott, entitled Invincible Louisa. She also wrote three Newbery Honor Books.

#2713

Cornelia C. Coulter

1885 - 1960 (75 years)

Cornelia Catlin Coulter was an American classicist and academic who was Professor of Latin at Mount Holyoke College from 1926 to 1951. She is known in particular for her work on the Medieval and Renaissance use of Classical sources and for her presidency of and advocacy for the Classical Association of New England.

#2714

Rosemary Woolf

1925 - 1978 (53 years)

Rosemary Estelle Woolf was an English scholar of medieval literature, known especially for her work on medieval English religious lyrics, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Biography Woolf was the daughter of British film executive C. M. Woolf. She was the first woman in her family to attend university, receiving a B.Litt. from St Hugh's College, Oxford in 1949. She became a lecturer at the University College of Hull in 1948. She became a lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford University in 1961, teaching Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English...

#2715

Ella E. Clark

1896 - 1984 (88 years)

Ella Elizabeth Clark was an American educator, writer, and Professor Emerita of English. Although Clark was not a trained anthropologist or folklorist, she collected large numbers of American Indian and First Nations oral traditions and made them available to a wide readership.

#2716

Dorothea Krook-Gilead

1920 - 1989 (69 years)

Dorothea Krook-Gilead was an Israeli literary scholar, translator, and professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University. Biography Krook was born in Riga, Latvia and moved to South Africa at the age of eight. She earned a degree in English literature at the University of Cape Town. In 1946 she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge, where she earned her Ph.D. and spent 14 years as a research fellow and assistant lecturer. Among her students there was the poet Sylvia Plath, who wrote that Krook was her ideal of a successful career woman and wonderful human being.

#2717

Alice Henson Ernst

1880 - 1980 (100 years)

Alice Henson Ernst was an American playwright, professor and author. She conducted anthropological work among the Native Americans in Oregon. Ernst was also well-known for her history and research of pioneer theater in the northwest. Ernst taught English and drama at the University of Washington and the University of Oregon.

#2718

Lauren Klein

Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.

#2719

Anne Sexton

1928 - 1974 (46 years)

Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom it was later alleged she physically and sexually assaulted.

#2720

Gladys Schmitt

1909 - 1972 (63 years)

Gladys Leonore Schmitt was an American writer, editor, and professor. Described by the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in 1942 as one of the city's "literary lights, her second novel, David the King became a Literary Guild selection which rose to number one on national bestseller lists.

#2721

Grace Macurdy

1866 - 1946 (80 years)

Grace Harriet Macurdy was an American classicist, and the first American woman to gain a PhD from Columbia University. She taught at Vassar College for 44 years, despite a lengthy conflict with Abby Leach, her first employer.

#2722

Helen Hull Law

1890 - 1966 (76 years)

Helen Hull Law was a professor of Latin and Greek at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina from 1914 until 1927 where her "depth and breadth of scholarship would have frightened the freshmen had not her charming shyness made them feel that they must put her at ease." In 1923 she founded and organized the Kappa Nu Sigma honor society on campus. Law later became professor of Greek at Wellesley College and retired in 1954 after 28 years.

#2723

Pearl S. Buck

1892 - 1973 (81 years)

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.

#2724

Léonie Villard

1878 - 1970 (92 years)

Léonie Villard was a French literary critic and professor at the Université de Lyon. She was the first woman to be a professor of literature at a French university. In 1917 she received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her book, Jane Austen: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre. She was also a member of the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in 1937 and 1950–1951. The college holds her diary of life in Vichy France during the Second World War.

#2725

June Rose Colby

1856 - 1941 (85 years)

June Rose Colby was an American professor of literature. She was the first female faculty member and third woman hired as an instructor at Illinois State Normal University, and was a supporter of the Suffragist movement.

#2726

Shirley Graham Du Bois

Shirley Graham Du Bois

1896 - 1977 (81 years)

Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.

#2727

Margaret Schlauch

1898 - 1986 (88 years)

Margaret Schlauch was a scholar of medieval studies at New York University and later, after she left the United States for political reasons in 1951, at the University of Warsaw, where she headed the departments of English and General Linguistics. Her work covered many topics but included focuses on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse literature.

#2728

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop

1911 - 1979 (68 years)

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".

#2729

Bing Xin

1900 - 1999 (99 years)

Xie Wanying , better known by her pen name Bing Xin or Xie Bingxin, was one of the most prolific Chinese women writers of the 20th century. Many of her works were written for young readers. She was the chairperson of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Her pen name Bing Xin carries the meaning of a morally pure heart, and is taken from a line in a Tang dynasty poem by Wang Changling.

#2730

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

1802 - 1838 (36 years)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L. The writings of Landon are transitional between Romanticism and the Victorian Age. Her first major breakthrough came with The Improvisatrice and thence she developed the metrical romance towards the Victorian ideal of the Victorian monologue, casting her influence on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. Her influence can also be found in Alfred Tennyson and in America, where she was very popular. Poe regarded her genius as self-evident.

#2731

Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva

1892 - 1941 (49 years)

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; her husband was executed.

#2732

Lady Gregory

1852 - 1932 (80 years)

Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.

#2733

Mary McCarthy

1912 - 1989 (77 years)

Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

#2734

Colette

1873 - 1954 (81 years)

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette , known as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.

#2735

E. Nesbit

1858 - 1924 (66 years)

Edith Nesbit was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.

#2736

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell

1810 - 1865 (55 years)

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell , often referred to as Mrs Gaskell, was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor. Her first novel, Mary Barton, was published in 1848. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, was the first biography of Charlotte Brontë. In this biography, she wrote only of the moral, sophisticated things in Brontë's life; the rest she omitted, deciding certain, more salacious aspects were better kept hidden. Among Gaskell's best known novel...

#2737

Selma Lagerlöf

1858 - 1940 (82 years)

Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was a Swedish writer. She published her first novel, Gösta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.

#2738

Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti

1830 - 1894 (64 years)

Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.

#2739

Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor

1925 - 1964 (39 years)

Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfections or differences of these characters typically underpins the drama.

#2740

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott

1832 - 1888 (56 years)

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet who wrote the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys . Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

#2741

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder

1867 - 1957 (90 years)

Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was an American writer. The Little House on the Prairie series of children's books, published between 1932 and 1943, were based on her childhood in a settler and pioneer family.

#2742

Harriet Monroe

1860 - 1936 (76 years)

Harriet Monroe was an American editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts. She was the founding publisher and long-time editor of Poetry magazine, which she established in 1912. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.

#2743

Marie Corelli

1855 - 1924 (69 years)

Mary Mackay , also called Minnie Mackey and known by her pseudonym Marie Corelli , was an English novelist. From the appearance of her first novel A Romance of Two Worlds in 1886, she became a bestselling fiction-writer, her works largely concerned with Christianity, reincarnation, astral projection and mysticism. Yet despite her many distinguished patrons, she was often ridiculed by critics. Corelli lived her later years in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose historic buildings she fought hard to preserve.

#2744

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

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.

#2745

Clarice Lispector

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.

#2746

Madame d'Aulnoy

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.

#2747

Maria Edgeworth

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...

#2748

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.

#2749

Carson McCullers

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.

#2750

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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