Who's your favourite fictional heroine?

I have a long list of female protagonists in fiction that I admire and I'm wondering which names you all will come up with. As a kid I was overawed with the 'boyish' George of the Famous Five! It was great the way she shunned female stereotypes, quite unusual for Enid Blyton. Then Nancy Drew became my role model! I loved the concept of a girl detective who was smart, independent and attractive. Moving on to more serious literature, one comes across scores of well-written female parts and it isn't easy to make a list of favourites. Some of mine are:

Dorothea in George Eliot's Middlemarch

Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (a no- brainer)

Emma in Jane Austen's eponymous novel

Catherine in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

Portia in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

Beatrice in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

Iris Chase of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (Booker Prize winner, 2000)

Maggie of Tennessee Williams' celebrated play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 and, yes, it was filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman)

... and many, many more.

It's tempting to talk about Maggie and Elizabeth Bennet because they're such obvious choices but, of the above, I think Beatrice's portrayal was quite path-breaking for its time and, among the modern day heroines, I am in complete awe of Iris Chase.

Beatrice's chutzpah and professed antipathy towards marriage make her a memorable character. She's not crude like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew but she's witty and yet a romantic at heart. Consider, for example, her response when her uncle Leonato wishes she is "one day fitted with a husband".
"Not till God make men of some other metal than earth," she says. "Would it not grieve a woman to be mastered by a pierce of valiant dust?"
Iris Chase in The Blind Assassin is a complex and incredibly clever woman, who reveals her extramarital affair by presenting it as a work of fiction by her dead sister Laura. The story is moving, smart and unputdownable. She's not just a rich woman caught in an unhappy marriage; she knows how important appearances are for the sake of high society and she also knows how to subvert those to effect a kind of catharsis.

So, who's on your list?

Lessons from The Pink Panther: How hard is it to write comedy?

What's harder to write- tragic scenes or comic ones?

This question always throws up lots of matter for debate. Isn't it true that in literature and in the movies it's tragic / dramatic pieces that usually win awards and receive approbation? Comedy is rarely given the same degree of importance, at least as far as the critics go. Yet, isn't good comedy incredibly difficult to write?

Watching The Return of the Pink Panther (for the nth time!) the other day, I was struck by the sheer brilliance of the actors' performances, comic timing and, of course, dialogue delivery. I know I've picked an easy one for movies of The Pink Panther series, particularly the original ones starring Peter Sellers, are recognized as cinematic masterpieces. The Return of the Pink Panther (released in 1975) is my favourite. It's the one starring Christopher Plummer as Sir Charles Litton, the Phantom, Herbert Lom as Clouseau's long-suffering boss Chief Inspector Dreyfus and Peter Sellers, of course, as the bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

Sample this:

Chief Inspector Dreyfus (to Clouseau): "You are suspended for six months, without pay..."

Clouseau: "Six months!"

Dreyfus: "Yes, without pay. Have you anything to say?"

Clouseau (after a moment's thought): "Could you lend me...fifty francs?"

This movie also has the famous 'follow that car scene' and the one in which Clouseau asks a passerby in Gstaad: "Do you know the way to Paris hotel?"
"Yes," says the man, and walks on!

The film is so good that scene after scene leaves you in splits. How I wish I could write like that!

In respect to the question I've asked, I think that it's hard to do both tragic and comic scenes well. But comedy poses a greater challenge because it relies on the all-important twist at the end, the punch that requires a reader's (or moviegoer's) expectation to be built up for something and then find exactly the opposite happen. It's the unexpected that keeps good comedy going, whereas in tragedies it's more Aristotelian, isn't it? We know the protagonist is doomed because of his own character flaws or because of circumstances beyond his control.

What do you think?