I haven’t read Earthsea, but I have heard nothing but great things about Ursala K. Le Guin.

I think I'd put Virginia Woolf on my list.

Depends on how you define "best". Most well known? Most read? Most highly awarded? Wrote the most? "Best" is such a vague and useless term here. I'll give it a go though.

Someone already mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin. So I'll add a few more along with their likely most well known book

• Mary Shelly (Frankenstein)
• Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express)
• Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
• Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
• Harper Lee (To kill a mockingbird)
• Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale)
• Laura Ingals Wilder (Little House on the Prairie)
• Beatrix Potter (The tale of Peter rabbit)
• Ann Frank (her diary)
• Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
• Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern)
• Octavia Butler (parable of the sower)

And just to spice it up a bit:

• Hiromu Arakawa (Full metal alchemist)

I think that's a good start. I'll end it here or I'll be here all day

Margaret Atwood should not be overlooked

The stand outs in my book(heh):

• Agatha Christie
• Mary Roach
• Ursula K LeGuin
• Madeline L'Engle
• Mary Ruefle
• Kathy Reichs

Since Le Guin is covered I would like to spptlight Margaret Killjoy as well.

Hard to beat Naomi Novik in my book.

In the realm of high fantasy, Margaret Weiss doesn't get enough love IMO.

Her work with Tracy Hickman, both Dragonlance and Death Gate Cycle (especially the Death Gate Cycle) are some of my favorite books.

Suzanne Collins.

In my opinion, of course. The Hunger Games were shockingly well-written for YA at the time, and they ring truer by the day.

Loved Anne rice. The lives of the Mayfair witches was one of my favourite things when I was younger. The vampire lestat series was pretty great too.

Sincerly hope nobody comes in to tell me she's some kind of awful person

I like Diane Duane's books!

For sci-fi, I can't recommend Linda Nagata enough. The Nanotech Succession and Inverted Frontier are a couple of my all time favorite series.

Idk if best of all time, but I don’t see enough women in SciFi so they stand out when I stumble across them.

Ann Leslie, Octavia Butler, and Marta Wells come to mind.

EDIT: this should say Ann Leckie. Autocorrect, you have fouled my plans again! ヽ( `д´*)ノ

Diane Duane.

She's written Star Trek stories, the Young Wizard series, another series about a world of elemental magic, her writing is engaging and accessible and intelligent and tight, and she's honestly a really kind and nice caring person.

Some favorite (mostly contemporary) authors:

Margaret Atwood A. S. Byatt Louise Erdrich Barbara Kingsolver Ann Patchett Ali Smith Jeanette Winterson Angela Carter

Some great authors:

George Eliot Virginia Woolf Charlotte Brontë Edith Wharton Jane Austen Toni Morrison Simone de Beauvoir Gertrude Stein Iris Murdoch Flannery O’Connor Alice Walker

Ursula LeGuin and Robin Hobb are 2 of my all time faves.