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?
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?
Portia for me....quite a stunt that she pulls off !!!!
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