I’m blessed to have great women in my life as family members, friends,
colleagues, and mentors. I never expect to find their equals in fiction, but I
am drawn to texts that focus on female characters. The following titles all
have wonderful female leads – and each woman challenges the status quo in some
way or another. Their wild ideas run the gamut from traveling 500 miles home
without a map to living a life in books; here’s hoping they give you a wild
idea or two of your own!
I mentioned in another post that Follow the River was one of those books that got me into trouble as
a young reader, and I haven’t re-read it in many years. It chronicles the
ordeal of Mary Ingles, an Indian captive who escaped from her captors and used
the river system to journey 500 miles home to western Virginia. On this
re-reading I found myself overwhelmed by what Mary endured. I couldn’t help
putting myself in her shoes (and in her bare, ruined feet) and wondering what I
would have done in her place. My one criticism of the book would be that Thom
struggles with giving voice to a woman. You can learn more about Mary and her travails here.
This is my second Lawson read and though I didn’t enjoy it
as much as Furiously Happy I did laugh aloud a few times. The most
important part of the book, to my mind, is the section in which Lawson talks
about miscarriage and ectopic pregnancies. I have experienced this myself and I
feel there is far too little honest, compassionate discussion of something that
seems to be very common. And if it takes some humor and irreverence to begin that discussion - maybe that's okay, too!
I read Middlemarch
most years… and I respond to it differently every time. When I started reading
my sympathies were firmly with Dorothea and with Fred, but I’ve come to sympathize
with Mr. Causabon and the dear Vicar. I feel a special sympathy with “brown
patch” Mary and Cecilia reminds me of my own dear, sensible sister! I may be
slightly amiss in calling it a book about a woman entirely (“Dorothea… but why
always Dorothea?” – even Eliot has to ask) but it does begin and end with
Dorothea and her ideas to improve the living conditions of the poor. Perhaps I
read the book again and again because I hope it’s final lines could be applied,
someday, to me:
“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though
they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the
earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably
diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric
acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been,
is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in
unvisited tombs.”
Hailed as a sort of feminist precursor to the film The Shape of Water, Mrs. Caliban is definitely worth your time… but I can’t decide what
I think about it. I love the domestic scenes between the sea creature and the
housewife, but the ending seemed to accelerate out of control into hopelessness…
which makes me wonder if earlier versions of feminism saw no hope for women
with the wild idea of loving the unusual (in terms of race, gender, etc.)? 
My favorite title on this list features the a
semi-fictionalized version of Elizabeth II who, late in life, discovers the
pleasure of reading. A sovereign reading for pleasure seems radical enough, but
wait until you see where her love of novels take her! Those seeking to get her
to put down her books are on the side of history, too – reading fiction was
once considered quite dangerous!
