Here are 100 books that The Moon and the Virgin fans have personally recommended if you like
The Moon and the Virgin.
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I have been studying Celtic myth and history since I was in college and took a class on Arthurian literature. Drawing heavily from Irish and Welsh lore to build my “land beyond the veil” known as the Five Quarters, I have always been intrigued by the Celtic view of the land of the dead as a distinct world to which we go and then return, like two sides of the mirrored surface of a well. I hope you enjoy these mythic fantasy books as much as I did!
I read this book so many years ago, but it has stayed with me. It struck me then, as it does now, as revolutionary in that it was one of the first retellings of the Arthurian myth from the female perspective.
I took a class on Arthurian Literature in university, and the tales of the period are obviously male-dominated. But The Mists of Avalon showed me a way into the female characters in the tale, and they are fascinating.
Here is the tragic tale of the rise and fall of Camelot - but seen through the eyes of Camelot's women: The devout Gwenhwyfar, Arthur's Queen; Vivane, High priestess of Avalon and the Lady of the Lake; above all, Morgaine, possessor of the sight, the wise, the wise-woman fated to bring ruin on them all...
Born and raised in Greece, I have always been fascinated by the history and mythology of my homeland. My love for reading historical fiction and Greek myths has been drawing me into stories of ancient civilizations and their timeless tales. Visiting archaeological sites and museums, where history comes to life through the remnants of the past has been a lifelong passion and Is a source of inspiration. These experiences have shaped my love for storytelling and my desire to breathe new life into Greek myths and history. In my writing, I aim to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern.
I loved this book for the way Madeline Miller creatively retells Greek myths with a female protagonist. As Circe grows up, she discovers her power of magic, which can transform enemies into monsters and even challenge the gods.
Bold and inspiring, Miller vividly strings together figures like Prometheus, Medea, Calypso, Odysseus, and the Minotaur in a feminist reimagining of Circe's life. I find it to be a thoughtful and well-crafted biography of a complex and engaging mythological character with both divine and human strengths and flaws. I have read it several times, and the story has maintained its appeal.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens…
I have worked in and around entertainment for my whole career until a set of midlife disasters sent me on a new path to become a psychotherapist. I never dreamed I would make a discovery like this along the way. This book is the culmination of a decade of research into an analog to The Hero’s Journey that is NOT a heroine’s journey. Like The Hero’s Journey, my book was discovered quite by accident at first and then pursued with a passion. The model helps women transform their lives and helps anyone create better women-driven narratives (from screenplays to psychotherapy).
Art historian Merlin Stone changed how the world thinks about archaeology. Her work pointed out that goddess statues at dig sites were more plentiful than male representation, and she wanted to know why. Her contemporaries simply dismissed these as “female figurines.”
Stone’s work made me think about a world where women’s power wasn’t treated like an unnatural or evil fallacy but a difference in power. Examining the historical record, she theorized that the power of women was suppressed by colonizing forces that placed more value on conquest than peace. That world is still with us! We still invest more in war rather than peace.
In Stone’s analysis, I found that women’s submission is not “natural” but has been perpetuated via violence and conquest.
The landmark exploration of the ancient worship of the Great Goddess and the eventual supression of women's rites.
In the beginning, God was a woman...
How did the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy come about? In fascinating detail, Merlin Stone tells us the story of the Goddess who reigned supreme in the Near and Middle East. Under her reign, societal roles differed markedly from those in patriarchal Judeo-Christian cultures: women bought and sold property, traded in the marketplace, and inherited title and land from their mothers. Documenting the wholesale rewriting of myth and religious dogmas, Merlin Stone describes an ancient…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
In 1995 I performed with the Women’s Circus (Australia) at the 4th International Conference and Forum on the Status of Women in Beijing. Our show was called Leaping the Wire and presented thirteen women’s stories from Amnesty International through physical narrative. My story was about a Brazilian woman who had been shot and killed for identifying the police who had rounded up her son and a group of his friends. The Brazilian women expressed their gratitude that I had told their story when they could not. I believe women’s stories are important to be told, to be shared, and I made a commitment to make our stories accessible, first through theatre, and now through my novels.
I read this book over thirty years ago and despite not returning to it, count it as having a significant impact on my work. It is an emotionally charged and powerful book, and I remember being incredibly angry, and sad, and passionate for change. It introduced me to feminism and feminist literature. It shone the light on the need to hear women’s voices in the public realm.
A landmark in feminist literature, THE WOMEN'S ROOM is a biting social commentary of a world gone silently haywire. Written in the 1970s but with profound resonance today, this is a modern allegory that offers piercing insight into the social norms accepted blindly and revered so completely.
'Today's "desperate housewives" eat your heart out! This is the original and still the best, a page-turner that makes you think. Essential reading' Kate Mosse 'They said this book would change lives - and it certainly changed mine' Jenni Murray 'Reading THE WOMEN'S ROOM was an intense and wonderful experience. It is in…
I have worked in and around entertainment for my whole career until a set of midlife disasters sent me on a new path to become a psychotherapist. I never dreamed I would make a discovery like this along the way. This book is the culmination of a decade of research into an analog to The Hero’s Journey that is NOT a heroine’s journey. Like The Hero’s Journey, my book was discovered quite by accident at first and then pursued with a passion. The model helps women transform their lives and helps anyone create better women-driven narratives (from screenplays to psychotherapy).
This book fundamentally changed my life when I was in my 20s. It was one of the first non-fiction books that helped me see myself. I begged my mother to read it, but it didn’t meet her standards at all.
That difference set up how I made sense of my relationship with my mother for a long time after that. The book's insistence that there IS a wild woman out there for every woman to connect to resonates now more than ever.
First published three years before the print edition of Women Who Run With the Wolves made publishing history, this original audio edition quickly became an underground bestseller. For its insights into the inner life of women, it established Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes as one of the most important voices of our time in the fields of Jungian psychology, myth, and women's mysteries.
Drawing from her work as a psychoanalyst and cantadora ("keeper of the old stories"), Dr. Estes uses myths and folktales to illustrate how societies systematically strip away the feminine spirit. Through an exploration into the nature of the…
Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.
At a moment when I was stuck in the long process of writing my book–newly divorced, overwhelmed by solo parenting young twins, and exhausted by pandemic shutdowns–this book reinvigorated me as a writer and mother. Phillips artfully demonstrates not only that motherhood and creative lives aren’t mutually exclusive, as the common trope would suggest, but that there are infinite paths to combining the two.
What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge.
With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms…
My passion started as a personal quest in my twenties, struggling with my relationship with my own mother. When my daughter was born, I knew that I could not repeat the difficult dynamics between my mother and I. What started as a personal quest to understand the underlying dynamics between mothers and daughters quickly grew into a professional quest. Today, I have worked as a mother-daughter therapist with thousands of mothers and daughters of all ages and from different countries and cultures and have developed the Mother-Daughter Attachment® model that helps therapists and mothers and daughters uncover the hidden dynamics in their relationship and create a roadmap for change.
Patriarchy has silenced women for generations, and in my first book, I uncover how women have been taught to “play nice” and be “care-givers” rather than “care-receivers.” Uncovering women’s emotional reality, I expose the culture of female service and how no one is looking after mothers, not even mothers themselves. This book provides exercises to help women claim their voice, needs, and rights in all of their relationships.
"The Silent Female Scream" teaches "how to believe that as a woman you have the right to be heard, valued and respected, and to know that anything less is just not okay." Through case studies and discussion, the author exposes that women's sense of self-worth and entitlement to speak their needs, especially in relationships, is an area that feminism has ignored to its peril. By looking at the legacy of emotional silence that many women have inherited from long before grandmother's day, she warns that emotional silence damages the mother-daughter relationship, women's relationships with themselves and each other, and their…
I have always been fascinated by women’s power in the workplace. My mother was intensely focused on breaking ground as a working mother of four small children on Capitol Hill in the 1960s. She was the first woman to be granted part-time status in Senator Ted Kennedy’s office. She worked her way up to speechwriter for Joan and personal correspondent for the Senator. And she kept a fierce border between work and home. And we were intensely proud of her. At a time when our friends’ mothers were mostly homemakers, our Mom had a cool job and kept a cool head among the political and intellectual elite – most of whom were men.
What a breath of fresh air! Daina Middleton gets it. She has been in the center of power at elite global companies, and she shares her observations and research data to clarify the critical differences and strengths that women and men bring to the table. And she brings in an often invisible – and certainly undervalued – element. Grace. A trait that women often bring, naturally. Respect, manners, consideration of others. Grit, by contrast, is more naturally embodied and projected by men: Competitive clashing and do-it-now urgency. I found it very satisfying to visualize the careful blend of grace and grit – and the resulting improvement in culture and the bottom line. Well done!
There is no mistaking that inequality in the workplace is still prevalent in the form of salary inequity and unequal representation in leadership and board positions. Too often conversations about inequality can lead to men and women believing they are alike. Women and men are not the same, biologically or psychologically, and these differences lead to significant dissimilarities in how each approaches leadership situations. Grace Meets Grit navigates the previously unexplored subject of gender differences in the workplace specifically applied to critical leadership behaviors. Leadership behaviors are what make us all successful in the workplace. They are how we are…
As an attorney, former TV broadcaster, and workplace consultant, I’ve devoted my career to empowering women and confronting systemic inequities. My passion stems from personal experience navigating the complexities of workplace harassment, which inspired me to write my book and guide others through similar challenges. I am continually drawn to books that illuminate the hidden power structures and offer practical tools for resilience, empowerment, and self-advocacy. The works on this list have profoundly shaped my perspective, providing inspiration and clarity in both my professional and personal journey. I hope they resonate with you as deeply as they have with me.
This book gave me permission to embrace and harness my anger as a tool for change. Chemaly’s exploration of how society suppresses women’s anger—and why we must reclaim it—is profound and eye-opening.
Her writing is sharp, relatable, and filled with research that helps contextualize why our anger is not only valid but vital. It left me feeling more equipped to channel my emotions into meaningful action.
A conversation-shifting book urging 21st-century women to understand their anger, embrace its power, and use it as a tool for positive change
'How many women cry when angry because we've held it in for so long? How many discover that anger turned inward is depression? Soraya Chemaly's Rage Becomes Her will be good for women. After all, women have a lot to be angry about.' GLORIA STEINEM
Women are angry, and it isn't hard to figure out why. We are underpaid, overworked, thwarted and diminished. The assertive among us are labelled bitches, while the expressive among us are considered shrill.…
Forthcoming eclipses coming up in Australia include that of 22 July 2028, which will cross Australia from the Northern Territory to Sydney, home of the internationally famous sights of the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Eclipse Chasers will act as a guidebook for both locals and international visitors, giving…
As a veteran business and finance journalist, I’ve always been amazed at the huge gender gap that still exists in so many parts of the economy and society despite all the strides we’ve ostensibly made. When I became a mother, it became even clearer to me that gender norms are still so entrenched in culture and still have a huge bearing on women’s economic and professional lives. I’ve written about this topic for a whole host of publications, from the BBC to The Washington Post. I have an MBA from Columbia Business School and am an associate Instructor in the Strategic Communications program at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies.
I loved this book because it simultaneously gives us a taste of the fierce spirit of the women’s liberation movement but also demonstrates what was wrong with Friedan’s particular flavor of feminism at the time: namely, that it was centered around white and mostly privileged women.
Reading this book is like being transported back to the 1960s and being a fly on the wall in the homes of women who were done with the patriarchy, who wanted to have careers and earn money, but were also grappling with their own roles in society.
It’s a historical document but also, in some ways, the 1960s equivalent of reality TV. It’s a ferocious cri de coeur that is delightful in its assertiveness.
Landmark, groundbreaking, classic-these adjectives barely do justice to the pioneering vision and lasting impact of The Feminine Mystique. Published in 1963, it gave a pitch-perfect description of "the problem that has no name": the insidious beliefs and institutions that undermined women's confidence in their intellectual capabilities and kept them in the home. Writing in a time when the average woman first married in her teens and 60 percent of women students dropped out of college to marry, Betty Friedan captured the frustrations and thwarted ambitions of a generation and showed women how they could reclaim their lives. Part social chronicle,…
