I think Edith Wharton is one of the most under-rated female authors. Yes, she is a bit well-known and some of her novels appear on AP reading lists, but most people manage to get through high school and college without ever having read her work, and if The House of Mirth were a Henry James novel (which it kinda could be), it would be put up on a higher pedestal. I don't know what it is about Edith Wharton -- maybe because her novels are about the American upper classes, or maybe because she was herself an extraordinarily wealthy and independent woman, no one takes her as seriously as an author who struggled a bit more? Wharton was widely celebrated in her own time, but her work seems to have fallen out of favor over other American women writers of the same era who were more concerned with class struggle, racism, and the immigrant experience (Willa Cather, for example). If nothing else, she should be lauded as the proof of concept for Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own; as an independently wealthy woman with few domestic concerns, Wharton was a very productive and successful writer.