Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood.
Offred refuses to be stripped of her desires or her agency, a simmering volcano enduring unending nightmares in a dystopia that increasingly feels like a documentary of the future.
Strings Attached
Reno in The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner
Reno is in love with adventure, freedom and her own untapped wildness in an electric journey racing the salt flats of Nevada, through to the 70s art world and left-wing Italian radicalism.
Eileen in Chelsea Girls, Eileen Myles
Autobiographical vignettes capture the wrenching, wry, booze-soaked journey of the queer poet who describes themselves as only liking getting drunk and being in love.
A girl with no name in L’Amant, Marguerite Duras
Duras’s impassioned yet languid lyricism captures her illicit affair as a pubescent girl with a wealthy older man in Indochina that is sensual, erotic, and disturbing.
Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Truman Capote.
A prostitute, and yet the only free character in the novella, Holly’s charm is of a mythic kind. Like bubbles in champagne, she can be bought but not contained.
Ifemelu in Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Brazen Ifemelu follows her dreams to America and is confronted by harsh realities, her story exploring racial and class inequalities bound up in a love lost, tested, but always enduring.
Mrs. Copperfield in Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles.
Embracing life-changing impulses against her own will, Mrs. Copperfield splits with convention in pursuit of novelty, sensuality and implied lesbianism in this modernist classic.
Lata in A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
A panoramic exploration of politics, religion, wealth, squalor and love in post-Partition India, where independent Lata, wrenched by the conflicts of passion, security and cultural differences, must choose a suitable boy to marry.
Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The tragedy of the Marquise is that only when she gets what she thinks she wants- to win or die- that she loses everything. The true Shadow of a romantic heroine!
Frankenstein’s Creature in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley.
The ultimate doomed romantic, whose nature was too sensitive to survive engagement with a rejecting world and became monstrous in the failed quest for love.