by Elizabeth Berg

Berg turns her attention to the life of French writer George Sand with this vivid historical novel.The book begins (in) 1831, and Aurore Dupin, a free-spirited young woman, is leaving her loveless marriage in the French countryside for a creative, bohemian life in Paris -- the life that will lead her to become literary icon George Sand.

by Amy Brill

Very loosely based on historical "girl" astronomer Maria Mitchell, Hannah Price spends her days going to Quaker meetings and tending to books at her town's library, but nights she spends with her eyes on celestial bodies or crouched over mathematical calculations, dreaming of discovering a comet all her own.

by Alexander Chee

Life as opera: the intrigues and passions of a star soprano in 19th-century Paris. She was the last surviving member of a Minnesota farm family swept away by fever; "Lilliet Berne" is a name she borrowed off a gravestone. Her original identity is buried under a succession of new incarnations and schemes for survival: a circus equestrienne, a high-level courtesan, a maid to the empress of France, a spy, and, ultimately, a "Falcon," the rarest breed of soprano.

by Jennifer Chiaverini

The daughter of England's beloved celebrity, Romantic poet Lord Byron, Ada Byron is rigidly protected from anything that might possibly develop imaginative or poetical tendencies passed along to her through her father's tainted Byron blood. No one could have been more determined to keep her out of harm's way than her mother, who left the doomed poet a month after his daughter was born and took their lives into her own capable, if controlling hands. 

by Jack Ford

On a Virginia plantation, 20 years before the start of the Civil War, Samuel Maddox makes a death-bed request of his wife, Mary: emancipate Kitty, a slave on their plantation and his biological daughter. Mary, who has been unable to bear Samuel's children, resents Kitty and initially resists. Kitty fears that Mary will sell her and her three children off just as she did Kitty's mother, so she decides to flee.

by Nicola Griffith

In seventh-century Britain, small kingdoms are merging, frequently and violently. A new religion is coming ashore; the old gods are struggling, their priests worrying. Hild is the king's youngest niece, and she has a glimmering mind and a natural, noble authority. She will become a fascinating woman and one of the pivotal figures of the Middle Ages: Saint Hilda of Whitby.

by Lawrence Hill

Around 1745, young Aminata Diallo is abducted from her West African home and sold into slavery in South Carolina. An observant and highly intelligent child, she quickly learns not only how to speak English but also how to read and write. On a trip to New York City with her master, Aminata escapes during chaotic anti-British demonstrations. She helps the embattled British compile The Book of Negroes, a list of thousands of black Loyalists, and these slaves are transported to Nova Scotia and granted their freedom.

A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham - whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) - transfixed the world.

 

by Jess Montgomery

Set in hardscrabble Appalachian Ohio coal-mining country in 1925, and centered on two determined women on opposite sides of the law -- Lily Ross, a sheriff's wife, and moonshiner, and union organizer Marvena Whitcomb, a miner's widow -- who are based on a pair of formidable historical figures, Maude Collins, Ohio's first female sheriff, and activist Mary Harris "Mother" Jones. 

by Jojo Moyes

When Alice marries the charming, athletic Bennett Van Cleve, she imagines bustling city life in America, so unlike her staid English existence. But when she gets to Baileyville, Kentucky, she finds her peers are suspicious and gossipy, her house is a shrine to Bennett's late mother, and her father-in-law sleeps in the room next door. 

 

by Laurie Notaro

There is danger in the skies above the Atlantic -- fierce winds, driving rain, lightning, and temperatures so cold that ice builds up on the wings of airplanes, dragging them out of the sky to the churning sea below. For English heiress Elsie Mackay, wealthy society widow Mabel Boll, and Ruth Elder, a young beauty pageant winner from Alabama, the thrill of being the first woman to cross the Atlantic in the air is deemed worth risking their lives for.

by Véronique Olmi

A fictional retelling of the life of Saint Josephine Bakhita, a former slave who became the patron saint of her native Sudan. Abducted as a child from her village, she is sold into slavery and given the name Bakhita (Arabic for lucky one ). Beaten and abused by a series of masters, she is finally sold to the Italian consul in Khartoum and eventually accompanies his return to Italy.

by Rosella Postorino

Germany, 1943: Twenty-six-year-old Rosa Sauer, impoverished and alone, makes the fateful decision to leave war-torn Berlin to live with her in-laws in the countryside, thinking she'll find refuge there. But one morning, the SS come to tell her she has been conscripted to be one of Hitler's tasters: three times a day, she and nine other women go to his secret headquarters, the Wolf'sLair, to eat his meals before he does.

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

In 1920, when she graduated from Vassar College with her degree in psychology, Rosalie Rayner took a coveted position at the Johns Hopkins research lab to assist the charismatic John B. Watson, the man who pioneered behaviorist psychology. Together, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner conducted experiments on hundreds of babies to prove behaviorist principles of nurture over nature. They also embarked on a scandalous affair that cost them both their jobs

by Mary Doria Russell

Annie Clements seems no different from other miners' wives: stretching pennies to keep house while accepting her husband Joe's drunken bluster and beatings without complaint. Her sorrow is that after seven years of marriage she has yet to conceive. Instead of motherhood, Annie has thrown herself into her responsibilities as president of the Women's Auxiliary of Local 15, the Western Federation of Miners.

by Miriam Toews

They have to meet in secret, and time is tight. They are grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and daughters in a Mennonite community. They have been attacked and raped. The bishop declared it the work of ghosts and demons and suggested that the women were being punished for their sins. Or perhaps they'd just imagined it, injuries notwithstanding. But the truth has finally emerged: the rapists are colony men. 

by Amy Stewart

Constance Kopp doesn't quite fit the mold. She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding fifteen years ago. One day a belligerent and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy, and a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats.

by Liza Wieland

Inspired by a missing period in poet Elizabeth Bishop's journals, Wieland imagines her adventures in France on the brink of World War II.  Although the bulk of the action takes place in 1936 and '37, we first meet Elizabeth as an undergraduate at Vassar in 1930.