Hot take: Favorite literary women

March 8th is International Women's Day! Let's share some appreciation for our favorite literary women (fictional and non—all are welcome). Who are your favorites?

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The Lancre Witches of Discworld.

Marmee March

Cordelia Naismith

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird who was just inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame.

Inductees must be deceased for two years and be from or affiliated with Alabama.

Characters:
Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, Smilla's Sense of Snow
Clarissa Harlowe, Clarissa: The History of a Young Lady
Henrietta Stackpole, The Portrait of a Lady
Aunt Betsy, David Copperfield
Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables

Authors:
Arundhati Roy
Anne Tyler
Katherine Ann Porter
Helen Hanff
Anne Frank
Agatha Christie
... what's my limit??

Mary Garth from Middlemarch

Catherine Arrowpoint from Daniel Deronda--She's a minor character, but the scene where she tells her parents that she's going to marry her music teacher is one of the best in the book.

Susan Sto Helit of the Discworld
Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Scarlett O'Hara and Melanie Wilkes, Gone With The Wind
Polgara, The Belgariad
Penelope Keeling, The Shell Seekers
Death in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series
Precious Ramotswe, No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Ona Vitkus, One In A Million Boy

All characters I would love to meet and talk to.

I’m tempted to name Queen Margaret, wife of England’s King Henry in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III. She’s a woman to make drug lords from lawless lands seem gentle. I like to imagine she and Judge Holden (from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian) uniting their talents in egregious enterprise.

On the other hand, maybe Margaret isn’t the best woman to name for celebration of anything worth celebrating. So, instead, I name Elizabeth Bennett, who while she was still officially unattached I rather took a liking to. Pity I didn't meet her in print until well into my seventh decade.

Honor Harrington
Tris Prior
Katniss Everdeen
Hermione Granger

Mrs Dalloway
Anna Madrigal
Muriel Spark

C. L. Moore (and her second marriage was a tragedy, as far as I'm concerned, because she quit writing then).
James Tiptree, Jr. (I always loved the "Jr." addition to her pseudonym.) "The Women Men Don't See" will always be with me.
Carola (in the novel written by Felix C. Forrest, one of the pseudonyms for "Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger", which also included Cordwainer Smith).

How could I forget Kate Wilhelm? Or Ursula K Le Guin?

Mrs Havisham

Madam from Rule Britannia by Daphne DuMaurier
Troy Alleyn
Alice (in Wonderland)
ETA: Harriet Vane

Daphne DuMaurier
Ngaio Marsh
Iris Murdoch
Virginia Woolf

These are two of my re-read authors.
Kathleen Woodiwiss and Mart Stewart.i

These are two of my re-read authors.
Kathleen Woodiwiss and Mary Stewart.

Harriet Blackstone in The Colour by Rose Tremain

Oh, I thought the term, "literary women" would refer to authors, not fictional women. What am I missing?

Anyway, Dorothy Sayers, Daphne du Maurier, Lois McMaster Bujold, Louisa May Alcott, oh, I could go on and on.

Thursday Next (from the Jasper Fforde books)

Vernon Lee is a really attractive sort. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Lee. Have read only some of her stories, which were fine but unremarkable, and none of her essays but lordy she sounds like someone worth knowing.

All the fictional women who immediately occur to me are in books too little known to specify, but possibly it's indicative of the predominance of men whose works are published that when I think of strong fictional female characters they are at least as often unpleasant or wet as they are admirable.

I love Lily James as Juliet Ashton in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by MA Shaffer and A Barrows

Also loved MacKenzie Foy as Clara in Disney's The Nutcracker and The Four Realms

Dame Maggie Smith adds a stern and solid performance as Minerva Mcgonagall