Stories of Women Behaving Badly in Literature

Deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is cast out of the royal court and sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey. At first Marie is taken aback by the severity of her new life, but soon she finds it gives her focus and she begins to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But will her sheer force of will be enough to enact the change she wants?

In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah.

The Idiot is a portrait of the artist as a young woman. With emotional sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Here is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting.

In the Tokyo suburbs, a young mother strangles her abusive husband and seeks the help of her coworkers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime. At once a masterpiece of literary suspense and a pitch-black comedy of gender warfare, Out is also a moving evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds, and the friendships that bolster them in the aftermath.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

Following the aftermath of World War I, Mrs. Wray, an impoverished widow and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers in their London home. But what they didn’t expect were Lilian and Leonard Barber, a young couple that will forever alter the course of their lives. Sexy and suspenseful, The Paying Guests is historical fiction at its best.

Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead. Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood and the trunk of her car is big enough for a body. Not that she gets any credit. But when the man Korede loves asks for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.

Retired schoolteacher, Olive Kitteridge, deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University, both running from secrets in their past. While at Edwards, Phoebe is drawn into a secretive cult founded by a charismatic former student. When the group commits a violent act in the name of the faith, Will and Phoebe struggle to accept their dueling visions of reality. Haunting and intense, The Incendiaries is a fractured love story that explores what can befall those who lose what they love most.

Fearless, candid, and incredibly funny, Lauren Holmes is a newcomer who writes like a master. She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves.

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return…

The quirky, overworked narrator of Chemistry seems to have the perfect life. She is making her Chinese parents proud by studying to get her PhD in chemistry, and her successful boyfriend just proposed! But instead of feeling certain for her future, she is wracked with ambivalence and finds herself veering off her life course in search of herself. Smart, moving, and always funny, this unique coming-of-age story is certain to evoke a winning reaction.

Emma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she is married to the provincial doctor Charles Bovary yet harbors dreams of an elegant and passionate life. Escaping into sentimental novels, she finds her fantasies dashed by the tedium of her days. Motherhood proves to be a burden; religion is only a brief distraction. In an effort to make her life everything she believes it should be, she spends lavishly on clothes and on her home and embarks on two disappointing affairs. Soon heartbroken and crippled by debts, Emma takes drastic action with tragic consequences for her husband and daughter.

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and she decides to spend a year under the influence under a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world. Both tender and blackly funny, the novel showcases a major writer working at the height of her powers.

Arriving in Buenos Aires in 1913, with only a suitcase and a violin to her name, Leda is shocked to find that the husband she travelled across an ocean to reach is dead. Alone and on the brink of destitution, she finds herself seduced by the tango. Knowing she can never play in public as a woman, Leda disguises herself as a young man to join a troupe of musicians. Powerfully sensual, The Gods of Tango is an erotically charged story of music, passion, and the quest for an authentic life against all odds.

Set in 1960’s London, Funny Girl is a lively account of the adventures of the intrepid young Sophie Straw as she navigates her transformation from provincial ingénue to television starlet amid a constellation of delightful characters. Insightful and humorous, Nick Hornby’s latest does what he does best: endears us to a cast of characters who are funny if flawed, and forces us to examine ourselves in the process.

Great Circle tells the unforgettable story of two badly behaved and unstoppable women. In the 1920s, Marian Graves is a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost. A century later, Hollywood actress Hadley Baxter, eager to redefine herself, is cast to play Marian in a film. Soon the two women’s fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide.