Bookish: Michael5000's Provisional Top Ten Classic Novels by Woman Writers

...a list I had cause to drum up last night.  "Classic" defined herein as "more than 50 years old."

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1. Charlotte Bronte, Villette -- Extremely well-written, and marvelous for its (shall we say) interrogation of Victorian high culture through the eyes of a practical, intelligent observer who hasn't been taught the rules of the game. A good woman's-eye view of Victorian romance, education, and career.

2. Murial Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -- Late for this list (1961) but just too damn good.

3. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm -- A spoof of the romantic rural novel in specific and high-concept melodrama in particular, and a book that makes me chortle a lot.

4. E.M. Delafield, Consequences -- A hard-to-find gem. A friend describes it as the "world's worst romantic comedy," because it continually messes with your genre expectations. Unusually, a non-comic novel with a very human but genuinely stupid heroine.

5. George Elliott, Middlemarch -- Casaubon is one of the greatest unlikeable characters in all of literature.

6, 7. Jane Austen, Emma or Pride and Prejudice -- Because the settings are removed in time and place, people sometimes read Austen without understanding that it is supposed to be funny... and is. Emma and Elizabeth are lovable  but they are also incredibly narrow in their thinking, and Austen makes fun of them in almost every sentence. The first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I had the impression it was set someplace on the northern rural fringes of England. In fact it is set a modest day's walk from the heart of London; the life in Austen is only provincial because those living it make it so.

8. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse -- Not an easy read, but a remarkable and rewarding one.

9. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall -- In 1848, a woman takes the persona of men writing about a woman whose circumstances lend few palatable options.

10. Mary Roberts Rineheart, The Amazing Interlude -- Another hard-to-find gem, and a rare beast: war and combat from a woman's point of view. Interesting insights into the default cultural assumptions of the 1910s as well.

* Leaving out Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie in the crime genre serial department, because we try to maintain certain standards around here.

** And yeah, yeah, Jane Eyre would be 11th or so.

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Thoughts?  Alternative lists?  Impassioned advocacy?