Women and Fiction

For International Women’s Day, lets think about the female in fiction.

Girls grow up reading about adventurous girls – think of George in Blyton’s books, Nancy and Peggy in Ransome, Hermione in the Potter books, Lara in the Pullman stories.

But when puberty strikes, the spirit of adventure seems to depart, and the heroines swop their dungarees for slinky frocks. They turn their gaze to the womanly arts and yearn to earn the love of a Good Man. Maybe real life takes over, their hormones change or we simply can’t have both men and women going out into the world and doing feats of derring do. For men, and books with male heroes, do keep up the adventurous fictional life long after their childhood and teenage years end and real life takes over.

Why don’t we do the same for women? Read the article in the Guardian: click

Young heroines

This is one of my favourite houses. I've never been inside of course. It is privately owned, and at the east end of Corbridge. I believe I read somewhere that it was once a tavern. There's a small window, now closed off, that opened right on the roadside so ale could be handed out to gentlemen on horses. It may all be bunkum, but my imagination runs wild whenever I go by, and I do pretty often. Perhaps I'll set a story there one day.
The second half of Jane Eyre lacked the intensity of the first half - possibly lacked Toby Stephens. Pleasant but definitely not as gripping. But then, I always thought the intrusion of the St John characters into the story a little odd.
One submission wended its way home today - they liked it but will reject the story because the heroine seems too young. So, the dilemma is - shall I age her? Or leave her alone? I don't disagree with them; I wrote her as very young, knowing that marriages in Tudor times were contracted between very young people. But perhaps readers will not empathise with such a young heroine.
However, I have sent off another story to them that has a heroine who is all of twenty-six. Perhaps they'll take to her.