Women Writer Names
A writer’s name can honor a particular voice or a much-loved book. This collection identifies the author behind each choice, including pen names where relevant, without claiming that a name predicts a child’s interests or abilities.
| Save name | Name & connection | History 1926–2025, yearly counts; individually scaled | Babies 2025 · rank | 5-year rank movement | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. | 2,230#125 | Down 2 rank positions in five years | 1921 | ||
Margaret Atwood, the novelist and poet. | 2,436#112 | Up 14 rank positions in five years | 1921 | ||
Virginia Woolf, the novelist and essayist. | 572#526 | Up 55 rank positions in five years | 1922 | ||
Alice Walker, the novelist and poet. | 3,547#65 | Up 11 rank positions in five years | 1921 | ||
Jane Austen, the novelist. | 1,380#221 | Up 43 rank positions in five years | 1947 | ||
Edith Wharton, the novelist. | 595#499 | Down 27 rank positions in five years | 1918 | ||
Sylvia Plath, the poet and novelist. | 1,017#300 | Up 202 rank positions in five years | 1937 | ||
Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. | 6,792#16 | Down 6 rank positions in five years | 2016 | ||
Isabel Allende, the novelist. | 1,746#177 | Down 20 rank positions in five years | 2006 | ||
Maya Angelou, the poet and memoirist. | 3,712#62 | Down 1 rank positions in five years | 2006 | ||
Elena Ferrante, the pen name of the Italian novelist. | 4,836#42 | Up 13 rank positions in five years | 2025 | ||
Toni Morrison, the novelist and Nobel laureate. | 81#2,274 | Down 633 rank positions in five years | 1960 | ||
Daphne du Maurier, the novelist. | 1,740#178 | Up 237 rank positions in five years | 2025 | ||
Willa Cather, the novelist. | 742#422 | Down 72 rank positions in five years | 2019 | ||
Octavia E. Butler, the science-fiction writer. | 982#308 | Up 26 rank positions in five years | 2021 | ||
Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women. | 407#697 | Up 28 rank positions in five years | 2021 | ||
Ursula K. Le Guin, the novelist and essayist. | 29#4,746 | Down 1 rank positions in five years | 1967 | ||
Zora Neale Hurston, the novelist and folklorist. | 264#969 | Down 94 rank positions in five years | 2019 | ||
Agatha Christie, the crime novelist. | 120#1,703 | Up 413 rank positions in five years | 1918 | ||
Beatrix Potter, the children's author and illustrator. | 162#1,360 | Down 194 rank positions in five years | 2019 | ||
Eudora Welty, the short-story writer and novelist. | 25#5,136 | Up 3,426 rank positions in five years | 1923 | ||
Flannery O'Connor, the short-story writer and novelist. | 6#13,769 | Down 4,626 rank positions in five years | 2006 | ||
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the novelist and essayist. | 28#4,789 | Down 939 rank positions in five years | 2018 | ||
Arundhati Roy, the novelist and essayist. | —Unranked | — | 2017 |
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Sources & methodology
Meaning summaries use Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) and referenced name histories. Each name’s detail page includes its sources.
Membership on this list is editorial — we chose names that genuinely fit the theme. Every number is from official birth data: "—" means the name had fewer than 5 recorded uses in 2025, which makes it a genuinely rare pick today, not an invalid one. The dot marks whether the stats shown are for the girls' or boys' use of the name.