Netflix recently released an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s heart-wrenching classic East of Eden. Helmed by Zoe Kazan, the miniseries remains relatively faithful to the source material and memorable piece of American literature—though it reframes its notorious villain, Cathy Ames. Whatever you may think of Cathy or star Florence Pugh’s unforgettable performance, she’s hardly the only antiheroine from the literary canon.
Since East of Eden was released on October 1, it’s already bolstered sales of the 1952 book. Whether you’re also revisiting the novel for the first time since it was part of your curriculum or adding it to your stack for the first time, you may as well add a few other classics to your TBR list. We rounded up several underrated classic novels also featuring flawed female characters, most of which are written by women—because, thankfully, women have always behaved badly.
Even more critically acclaimed than Jane Eyre at the time of its release, Brontë’s most autobiographical novel follows Lucy Snowe, a peculiar young woman who flees her English home after a family tragedy to make a life for herself in France.
This early American feminist novel follows 28-year-old Edna Pontellier, a Louisiana wife who, after learning to swim and meeting a man, refuses to stay home and be a mother. Instead, she takes up painting, which, naturally, leads everyone around her to think she’s fallen ill.
This comedy of manners takes on the jaded wealth of 1920s N.Y.C., following 29-year-old socialite Lily Bart as she tries to find a husband amidst the newly rich rail and shipping tycoons. That is, until she’s accused of being the mistress of a wealthy man, and the book’s real tragedy comes to the forefront.
Redmon Fauset called her classic Harlem Renaissance novel a “novel without morals.” In it, a light-skinned Black woman moves from Philadelphia to N.Y.C., where she decides to pass as white to pursue a career as a painter. Meanwhile, her sister, who has darker skin, stays in Philadelphia and proudly embraces her identity.
This novel captures the peacetime between World Wars I and II in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, following an unforgettable crew, including a woman who cheats on her husband with a series of female lovers and a trans gynecologist.
A young woman tries to escape the tragedy of the death of her newborn and the dissolution of her marriage in a series of cheap Paris hotel rooms, where she takes sleeping pills and resolves to dye her hair blonde.
Published in Brazil when Lispector was only 23—and earning her the nickname “Hurricane Clarice”—this novel takes shape as the interior monologue of a young woman named Joana, tracing her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage.
Set in 1930s Osaka ahead of World War II, this story of a prominent family in decline is a pillar of Japanese literature, featuring four sisters who are as lovable as they are flawed.
Graham Greene’s juicy, heartbreaking novel is about the rise and fall, and complicated aftermath, of a love affair in World War II London. The object of the narrator’s obsession is Sarah, a woman who lives exactly according to her own desires, much to the pain of the men around her.
Set in England at the turn of the century, Angel is a piercing satire of a schoolgirl who dreams of becoming wealthy. When she turns her imagination into a bestselling book, her fantasy starts to become real.
The ultimate N.Y.C. workplace novel follows four working girls in 1950s Manhattan, as they gossip, gallivant, and navigate messy relationships in and outside of the office.
This masterfully creepy Gothic classic follows Merricat Blackwood, who practices witchcraft and lives on her family estate with her elderly uncle Julian and sister Constance, who has recently been acquitted of killing the rest of the family with arsenic.
Good news for those already missing Florence Pugh on screen: She’ll soon star in the adaptation of this witty, strange, and unnerving classic. The book follows Cassandra, a lesbian grad student hellbent on sabotaging her identical twin sister’s wedding. (Flo’s also playing the sister!)
Sylvia Plath’s first and last novel follows Esther Greenwood, an ambitious, lonely, and depressed young woman coming of age in the 1950s while grieving her father’s death and lamenting looming expectations of marriage and children. When she starts receiving electroshock therapy, it only drives her deeper into madness.
Joan Didion’s most arresting and raw work traces the undoing of Maria Wyeth, a failed actress institutionalized in a psych ward, who recounts everything that got her there: a sick newborn, an affair and subsequent abortion, and long days driving on L.A. highways.
Written by Toni Morrison’s longtime editor, Fish Tales is a glamorous party-girl novel set in 1970s New York and Detroit, following champagne-guzzling Lewis Jones, whose life is upended by a handsome man. Who amongst us?!