Favourite female character.
I loved the characters, Sue and Maude, in Sarah Waters’ phenomenal novel Fingersmith. The story is told, first from Sue’s point of view and then from Maude’s and it’s hard to imagine loving either of them given the nasty business they’re messed up in. But Waters’ Victorian-era novel is so layered and rich and exciting and the characters so fully-realized and compelling…it’s almost impossible not to empathize with and root for both girls.
I also love Sara Crewe from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princes.
Of course the greatest power Sara possessed, and the one which gained her even more followers than her luxuries and the fact that she was ‘the show pupil’, the power that Lavinia and certain other girls were most envious of, and at the same time most fascinated by in spite of themselves, was her power of telling stories and making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.
It is Sara’s imagination which sustains her when hope is lost. I admired that quality so much when I was a child, and I still do.
Other female characters I admired: Jo from Little Woman; Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre; Anne from Anne of Green Gables
The girls from my youth. Girls with spirit and full-hearts and hope.
The Ludic Reader 