At the beginning of this whole entire process, I faced a nervewracking choice:  I wanted to write about great heroines of literature.  But did I want to limit my perspective to just female authors?

In the end, I decided yes and focused on heroine/author pairs whose qualities complimented or offset one another.  But with the same stroke, I cut out a whole set of incredible heroines written by men.  In apology, and in tribute, here are some of my faves:

• Mary Mackenzie – The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd:  This book was given to me by a friend who apparently knew my tastes inside and out.  Mary is a proper English girl who travels to China to fulfill an engagement to a man she barely knows.  Her slow liberation from a corseted existence and her torrid affair with a mysterious Japanese nobleman makes for gut-wrenching, page-turning reading.  Better yet, this book is epistolary (and pulls it off!) and deals with a facet of imperialism I had never thought of before.
• Lucy Honeychurch – A Room With a View by E.M. Forster:  Oh, A Room With a View.  I have watched your Merchant Ivory loveliness a million times, but I never really appreciated you before reading the book upon which you were based.  Lucy is annoying, flawed, and hopelessly muddled, and her story is easily one of my favorites ever.
• Matilda Wormwood – Matilda by Roald Dahl:  A reader, an adventurer, and a brave little soul, Matilda stands at the center of a book that completely galvanized eight-year-old me.  Her antics may be unrealistic, but her pluck and spunk aren’t.
• Anna Karenina – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:  You know those characters you love to hate?  This was a book I loved to hate…it just didn’t resonate with me the first time around.  But I gave it a second chance (somehow), and discovered a petty, selfish, insecure, nuanced, and miserable character in the lovely, corrupt Anna.  If you were forced to read this book in high school or college, consider giving it a second chance (I recommend the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation).

This is a woefully incomplete list, but it’s good to remember that women aren’t the only people who can write incredible heroines.  So…who’s on your list of favorite guy-authored heroines?