The Best Books About Women’s Rage

by Carol LaHines
|
6 books
While men have traditionally been afforded latitude in expressing rage and violence, women have not. They have been pathologized; they have been institutionalized; they have been dismissed and derided as shrews, harpies, vengeful castrators. Recognizing women’s anger is in essence about recognizing their full personhood and their entitlement to rage much the same as men have been permitted to rage.
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The Dry Heart

Natalia Ginzburg, 2019
Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart - described as “a lucid feminist horror story about marriage”—begins with the arresting lines “I shot him between the eyes.” Although the unnamed protagonist seems more depressed than enraged, I would argue that it’s part of a continuum. Her affect might seem flat because she has endured so much and will endure so much, though she in the end will exact her measure of justice upon the person of the husband—who embodies so much of her torment, from his casual affairs to his lack of affection to his failure to share her grief over the loss over their child.

The Days of Abandonment

Elena Ferrante, 2005
Elena Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment involves a main character whose husband leaves her for a younger version. Olga is on a quest to understand why. She exhibits what some might call aberrant, even psychotic behaviors, as obsession shades into madness.

Notes on a Scandal

What Was She Thinking?: A Novel
Zoë Heller, 2006
What Was She Thinking (Notes on a Scandal)? by Zoe Heller is another book about an angry woman that I greatly admire. The unreliable first-person narration of Barbara Covett is pitch perfect; the narrator is invested in telling the story of her best friend’s affair with a student, purporting to tell her side in order to exonerate her, but in the meanwhile, the narrator has her own insidious agenda. The two strands—the story of Sheba and the story of her own solitary life—moving in counterpoint. The book is a case study in voyeurism—our need to watch, to cast judgment, to stand in the shoes of, the experience of schadenfreude.

Circe

Madeline Miller, 2018
Circe by Madeline Miller is a feminist retelling of the Greek myth, recounted from the perspective of the mythical sorceress Circe, daughter of the sun god Helios and the water nymph Perse, who was banished for eternity by Zeus on account of her witchcraft. After she is raped by a ship captain, she becomes a woman metamorphosed by righteous anger.

Animal

A Novel
Lisa Taddeo, 2022
Animal by Lisa Taddeo features an anti-heroine with a dark past. The protagonist, Joan, witnessed a horrific event as a child that has shaped her ever since. The novel is a raw depiction of female rage, as Joan confronts her past, rants against a patriarchal society, and undergoes a transformation from victim to predator.

The Vixen Amber Halloway

Carol Lahines, 2024
The Vixen Amber Halloway by Carol LaHines is about a Dante professor who descends into darkness after her husband leaves her for another woman. The novel, structured as a jailhouse confessional, is a dark comedy, a suspenseful revenge fantasy, an oeuvre of woman’s rage, and a moving portrait of one woman's psychological breakdown; for me, the work began as a love letter to Nabokov’s Lolita, whose use of unreliable narration I’ve always admired.