Help from Your Favourite Heroines

What is it that makes a character in a novel memorable? Perhaps it would help to answer this question by asking it in a different way: who are the characters you most remember? If you can come up with the who, it might lead you to the why and that in turn might be of help when you are conjuring your own protagonists out of that thin, thin air.

In terms of heroines, my younger self would probably say Scarlet O'Hara from Gone with the Wind, but more mature contenders would be Anna Karenina, Nana, the heroine from the Zola's book of the same name, and Tess of the D'Urbevilles 

 Why Scarlett O'Hara? Because she is so flawed and so beautiful– she behaves badly, has no moral compass and no self-knowledge. Because she is punished for all of these things and remains indomitable.

Why Anna Karenina? Why Nana? Both of them find themselves on the outside of society, one as an adulteress, the other as a prostitute. They're not conventional, nor are they seen as ideals of womanhood. They are compromised and unhappy and the dilemmas they face seem real. Anna ends by hitting the self-destruct button, Nana ruins every man she comes into contact with. The terrible workings of cause and effect in both their lives are plain to see. The same is true of Tess, whose unfortunate seduction by Alec is her social and moral and doing. She is both victim and avenger.

Perhaps there's a bit of the theme emerging here. The women I have chosen all have tragic stature because their fall from grace is so vertiginous. With the exception of Anna,  these women fight back, they show resilience. Their behaviour is extreme and in some ways subversive, and three out of four of them end by dying, something which makes the stakes of their respective stories extremely high. They are passionate, risk-taking and rebellious, and yet beneath this we glimpse their vulnerability, qualities which form a combustible mix.

When you are thinking about your next project, it might be helpful to conduct a brief survey of the heroines you admire. If you can work out what it is that attracts you to them, you are halfway to being able to endow your own protagonist with their feistiness, or their fragile glamour, or whatever it was that drew you to them in the first place.