Are these the 50 most influential books by women?

As readers pointed out, my last list was rather skewed to a male-dominated tradition. Here is an alternative perspective.

Check these out ... The Women's Library in London. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

Last week's post about the 50 turning-points of English (and American) literature stirred up quite a bit of debate, raising some interesting issues. One of the big complaints about my selection was the inadequate representation of women writers. This blog has been admittedly slow to engage with the gender politics of literature, but this challenge – what about the women ? – is self-evidently a fair question.

My previous list (and it was only a list) reflected patriarchal values, and a male-dominated literary culture. That's hard to avoid, in the light of history. But, as Kathleen Taylor and Gillian Wright have shown, there is another story, a different way of looking at our cultural bibliography.

And so, 50 years to the day since the death of Sylvia Plath, here is my alternative Anglo-American list of the 50 women writers who shaped our literary landscape – a list constructed with no conferring on my part with any other pre-existing catalogue.

I have followed, so far as possible, the same criteria: basically, the impact of the individual writer, or her book, on literary history. For the record, this new catalogue joins an archipelago of related literary lists.

As before, I've taken Shakespeare (not Chaucer) as the starting point. So I open with the extraordinary Aphra Behn. To go back into medieval times, takes us into the continental Latin tradition, about which – full disclosure – I know almost nothing.

One obvious point that emerges from this catalogue is that from roughly 1900 and the emancipation of women (followed by the dynamic effects of two world wars), the historical imbalance starts to be redressed. Before 1900, any list of women writers (poets, playwrights and novelists) is virtually self-selecting. After 1900, it becomes competitive, and contentious – as it should be. There are no free rides up Parnassus.

1. Aphra Behn: Orinooko, (1668)

2. Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter and Delariviere Manley: The Female Wits (1696)

3. Mary Wortley Montagu: Letters and poems (c1720)

4. Mary Scott: The Female Advocate (1774)

5. Fanny Burney: Evalina (1778)

6. Hannah More: Sacred Dramas (1782)

7. Dorothy Wordsworth: Grasmere Journal (c. 1790)

8. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

9. Maria Edgeworth; Castle Rackrent (1800)

10. Mary Hays: Female Biography (1803)

11. Jane Austen: Emma (1815)

12. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

13 Fanny Trollope: The Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

14. Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1847-48)

15. Elizabeth Gaskell: North and South (1854)

16. Mrs Beeton: Book of Household Management (1861)

17. Charlotte M Yonge: Biographies of Good Women (1862)

18. Louisa May Alcott: Little Women (1868)

19. Emily Dickinson: Poems (c1870)

20. George Eliot: Middlemarch (1871)

21. Beatrix Potter: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

22. Baroness Orczy: The Scarlet Pimpernel (1903)

23. E Nesbit: The Railway Children (1906)

24. Katherine Mansfield: In A German Pension (1911)

25. Rebecca West: The Return of The Soldier (1918)

26. Dorothy Parker (c1920-1935)

27. Agatha Christie: The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)

28. Ivy Compton Burnett: Pastors and Masters (1925)

29. Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own (1929)

30. Antonia White: Frost in May (1933)

31. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca (1938)

32. Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children (1940)

33. Dodie Smith: I Capture The Castle (1949)

34. Josephine Tey: Daughter of Time (1951)

35. Elizabeth David: French Country Cooking (1951)

36. Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr Ripley (1955)

37. Sylvia Plath: The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)

38. Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

39. Mary McCarthy: The Group (1962)

40. Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook (1962)

41. Jean Rhys: The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

42. Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch (1970)

43. Elizabeth Taylor: Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

44. PD James: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)

45. Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince (1973)

46. Beryl Bainbridge: The Bottle Factory Outing (1974)

47. Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1979)

48. Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping (1980)

49. Carol Ann Duffy: "Whoever She Was" (1983)

50. Julia Donaldson: The Gruffalo (1999)

Plus a bonus:

JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1995)