There’s an important experience that straight women and gay women have in common — and no, I don’t mean lusting after Angelina Jolie. Falling in love with literary heroines seems to me like something that transcends sexuality, mostly because it isn’t really about sex. The best literary heroines are a mixture of what you can identify with — what you’ve felt and experienced — and what you’d like to be. They are usually smart, strong and not the most beautiful girls in the room; yet somehow they have a charm that puts the most beautiful girls in the shade. Sometimes they don’t even have that outward charm, but because of the internal focus of novels, the reader can still see, and love, their integrity and wit.
Growing up, I liked reading about Jo March in Little Women and Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House books. I loved Sara Crewe from A Little Princess and Matilda from the Roald Dahl story. There was Emily Byrd Starr from
Anne of Green Gables author L. M. Montgomery‘s lesser-known Emily books, and the strange, moody Fuchsia Groan from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. There was shy, secretive, angry Beth Ellen from lesbian Harriet the Spy author Louise Fitzhugh’s The Long Secret.
Here are my 5 favorite literary heroines as a grownup:
1. Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Jane Austen wrote of her Lizzy that “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print,” and she will hear no disagreement from me. As well as reading the book, I’ve also watched three “lively and determined” Elizabeths play out the drama on screen: Greer Garson in 1940, Jennifer Ehle in 1995, and Keira Knightley in 2005.
While I like Keira Knightley, I have to say that her performance was lacking something crucial that the two others conveyed to me: Elizabeth’s maturity, her full understanding even at a young age of how degrading it would be to have an unequal marriage like her parents’. Over the course of the book, Elizabeth discovers that her strong moral judgments are not always right: She is mistaken about Mr. Wickham, mistaken about Mr. Darcy. But she still has an intelligence and strength of character that sets her apart from all other heroines for me — and I can never get enough of her telling off Lady Catherine.
2. Shirley Keeldar from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849)
For a lot of people, a Charlotte Brontë heroine means Jane Eyre. But much as I like Jane, she didn’t capture my heart the way Shirley did. Named for the boy that her parents wanted her to be (Shirley was a male name in Charlotte Brontë’s day), Shirley is supposed to have been partly based on Charlotte’s sister Emily (pictured below) — particularly in her independence and her love for animals.
There are also some intriguing parallels between Shirley and Anne Lister, a real-life nineteenth-century lesbian whose diaries were first published in 1988. Both are Yorkshire landowners who adopt a masculine persona. (Lister was nicknamed ‘Fred’ by an early lover, and she formed a long-term relationship with a woman called Ann Walker, who came to live with her).
Playing on her boy’s name, Shirley refers to herself as “Captain Keeldar,” and at one point tells her governess that if she was a man, “there was not a single fair one in this and the two neighboring parishes, whom she would have felt disposed to request to become Mrs. Keeldar, lady of the manor.”
Some readers might speculate that Shirley changes her mind on this as she gets to know Caroline, the other heroine of the novel, with whom she becomes close friends. Unlike Anne Lister, Shirley is conventionally feminine and beautiful, and she does eventually marry a man (though their engagement makes her strangely nervous). But I still remain partial to the scene where, running with Caroline through a field at night with an urgent message, she gallantly offers to carry her across the narrow plank over a river. Just what any well-mannered gay girl ought to offer to do for her girlfriend.
3. Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853)
The heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, Lucy Snowe is like an older, wiser Jane Eyre, without the fairy-tale ending. Angry, cagey, clever, bitter and searingly sarcastic, she thoroughly offended notions of Victorian womanhood — which, of course, is one of the reasons why I love her.
Like Shirley, her sexuality is also intriguingly ambiguous. She falls in love with the beautiful young Dr. John — who tends the Belgian girls’ school where she works — and also with the irritable professor, M. Paul Emanuel (the idea that any decent woman could fall in love with two men at once was one of the things that horrified Victorian critics). But she also finds herself strangely drawn towards the pretty coquette Ginevra Fanshawe, and admires her employer, Madame Beck, enough to say, “Had I been a gentleman I believe Madame would have found favour in my eyes.” Watching Lucy and Ginevra flirt with each other is, in my opinion, one of the great pleasures of this amazing novel.
4. Ursula Brangwen from D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915)
The Rainbow
is the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, growing up and growing old in the north of England. The first two generations follow a sort of animal existence, having some intellectual curiosity and aspirations when they are young, but soon settling into stolid marriage and parenthood. Then along comes Ursula, whose freshness, force, and lust for life are not so easily dampened. She falls in love with a soldier, Anton Skrebensky. She develops a lesbian crush on her teacher, Winifred Inger, and pursues it quite uninhibitedly and unembarrassedly.
Lawrence put a lot of his own experience into Ursula — particularly into the account of her working as a schoolteacher — and the result is one of the most vivid, sensitive, imaginative female characters ever created.
5. Catherine Bourne from Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986)
I’ve blogged about the upcoming film adaptation of
Garden, which will star Mena Suvari as the beautiful, boyish Catherine.
Those who have read the book might wonder what Catherine is doing on a favorites list — after all, she is jealous, unreasonable, unstable and destructive. But when it’s the 1920s and you’re starting to realize you might be a lesbian — or possibly even transgender — it seems to me you’re entitled to be a little cranky. Particularly when your husband and your girlfriend keep hinting that you’re sinful and perverted.
When the book was first published in 1986, E. L. Doctorow wrote in The New York Times that “its major achievement is Catherine Bourne […] Catherine in fact may be the most impressive of any woman character in Hemingway’s work.” What I personally love about Catherine is how, even in the context of a narrative and a time that disapproves of her, she remains a real and rounded character — she never succumbs to a two-dimensional Tragic Lesbian stereotype.
Those are my favorites. Who are yours?
