Five fantastically fierce female protagonists in five fabulous books. These women do not back down – they are relentless. And yet they are not just weird alpha (fe)males in summer dresses. They are brilliantly depicted feminine characters – and they know exactly what they are about.
North And South by Elizabeth Gaskell (1855)
An early fish out of water trope with some grumpy sunshine thrown in. Margaret Hale leaves her comfortable but suffocating rural existence and relocates to the grimy north of England in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. She meets Mr Thornton, who dismisses her as a southern softy. He is wrong.
She stands firm and thrives in her new situation, bridging the gap between the workers and the bosses, something Mr Thornton has failed to do, and ultimately bringing both sides together. But it’s not easy and industrial unrest is rife. In the pivotal midpoint scene, she faces down a mob of angry strikers, and it’s not clear if she’s going to get out unscathed, or even alive. A powerful scene, in a great book featuring one of my very favourite protagonists of any gender.
South Riding by Winifred Holtby (1938)
We move forward 80 years but stay in the north of England for Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece – South Riding. Published posthumously, this tells the intertwining stories of the inhabitants of South Riding, a fictional local government district in the non-fictional county of Yorkshire.
There are multiple characters and multiple storylines, but the book begins with the arrival of Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the rundown local girls school, and the story is hers. The book fizzes along – from Sarah’s fights to improve the lives her pupils, to her grumpy sunshine almost-romance with local landowner Robert Carne. And it is Sarah Burton who fizzes the most.
The closing scene is both outrageous and perfect. During the Silver Jubilee celebrations, Sarah finds herself in a plane which spins out of control and crashes. But Sarah is made of strong stuff and she is fine. She walks out of the wreckage and over the fields to rejoin her pupils and continues to teach them for the rest of the afternoon. Amazing.
Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre (1978)
Dreamsnake tells the story of Snake, an itinerant healer in a post-apocalyptic Earth. She travels between nomadic tribes, treating the sick with her almost tame snakes, Sand and Mist. For her patients who are beyond saving then her dreamsnake, Grass, provides an easeful death. When Grass is inadvertently killed, Snake is forced to travel across a hostile landscape to find his replacement.
During her quest, Snake traverses radioactive deserts, dodges crazed bandits, and battles mysterious off-worlders, all to provide healing and relief to the tribes she works with. A sense of calm, warmth and courage pervades the book which emanates from Snake herself. She is the reason why the book is so great.
Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow by Peter Høeg (1992)
Smilla Jaspersen is an otherworldly loner, who befriends Isaiah, a small boy with a troubled background. When he is killed falling from a snowbound roof, she begins to investigate. The trail ultimately leads to Greenland, where she faces numerous perils and strange happenings and implacably and heroically faces them all.
I imagine Smilla Jaspersen to be an elegant and mysterious presence, clad entirely in black, contrasting the icy landscapes that she knows so well and loves so much. I always assumed that she was neurodiverse, but reading the book again, her isolated nature and fascination with snow is borne out of her difficult upbringing, rather than her non-standard mental wiring. Nevertheless I still choose to read it that way, and imagine Smilla Jaspersen to be on the autism spectrum – which makes me like her all the more.
Double Fault by Lionel Shriver (1997)
I could have picked any one of Lionel Shriver’s novels but this one is a firestorm. Willy Novinsky is an up and coming tennis player, and one of Lionel Shrivers best and spikiest characters. She marries Eric, an inferior player, and has to bite her lip when his tennis career takes off while hers flounders.
Except she doesn’t bite her lip, she lets fly with the full force of her rage and frustration. Everything spirals out of control and both her sporting career and marriage detonate spectacularly.
She is ultra-fierce, ultra-competitive and ultra-captivating. Willy isn’t someone who I would particularly like to spend time with unless she is safely confined within the pages of a paperback. I could say that about all Lionel Shrivers characters though – and in spite of that (or perhaps because of it) she is one of my favourite authors.
But Does Gender Matter Anyway?
Almost certainly not. Picking out strong female characters from a small selection of books implies that the rest of the female literary universe is populated solely by girly blossoms who sit in meadows and make daisy chains. Making this list is sliding around on the thinnest of ice.
I deliberately put these books in date order, and it became clear that picking fierce female characters from the older books works (sort of). Madam Bovary and Anna Of The Five Towns would have fitted nicely into this list, and Dreamsnake was one of a number of second wave feminism science fiction books that were published in the late sixties and seventies, many of which could have also found a place here.
But when we get to the 1990s it doesn’t hold up. I picked Miss Smilla because of (what I imagine is) her neurodiversity, and Lionel Shriver just writes amazingly spiky characters who happen to be (mostly) female. I skimmed down my GoodReads list searching for more recent examples but nothing stood out, largely because everything did. A Game Of Thrones, The First Law fantasy series, Book Lovers, Candy House, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow have plenty of great female characters, as do many other recent novels.
So a flawed premised for a book list, but enjoyable endeavour nonetheless. And it’s always good to find an excuse to revisit old reads, and each one of these was a pleasure.
Photo by Blake Meyer on Unsplash
