The best classic books featuring exceptional female protagonists

I believe that Jane Austen’s novels continue to be massively popular largely because she possessed a talent for creating uniquely authentic and complex female heroines, and never more so than in Emma.

Austen famously said of Emma that she would be “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” From the opening line of the novel, we are set up to dislike this “handsome, clever, and rich” heroine.

Nevertheless, over the course of the novel we fall in love with Emma because despite her worst qualities—spoilt, headstrong, self-important—she is also smart, loyal, affectionate, and honest.

Against Austen’s prognosis, Emma does not prove unlikable, rather she is so entirely, compellingly human that we love her as we do our own sisters, friends, and daughters.

In few pages of literature we will find such a remarkably clear-eyed, beautiful portrait of a young woman on the threshold of maturity.

Margaret Hale is an unlikely rebel.

When we first encounter her in Gaskell’s social novel concerning industrialization and class, she appears to be the model of demure Victorian womanhood. She has lived a happy, privileged life. Everything changes when her clergyman father suffers a crisis of conscience and becomes a dissenter.

Forced to uproot his family, they leave their picturesque village in the south of England for the thriving northern industrial city of Milton. In Milton, Margaret is overwhelmed by the jarring cacophony of industrialization.

Through her poignant friendship with a girl from the laboring class, and a contentious relationship with her father’s pupil and friend—Mr. Thornton, a cotton manufacturer—Margaret must come to terms with her own prejudices, stand for her convictions, and determine what makes for a truly meaningful life.

Her rebellion against the expectations of her class is quiet, but no less bold for its quietude.

Thomas Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene is like that friend who is sure she has all the answers but really has no idea how much she has yet to learn about life, love, and friendship.

When Bathsheba inherits her uncle’s farm she understands, and relishes, that she is now completely the master of her own destiny, a fate not common for unmarried young women of her time. Her determination is admirable, but she is as well a uniquely frustrating character.

Independent and intelligent, she is also dangerously headstrong and proud, and her inability to look to others for guidance makes her prone to grave errors.

Through all of her miscalculations and rectifications, we readers are rewarded with the portrait of a truly complex and remarkable heroine.

It is impossible to separate Cather’s heroine Alexandra Bergson from the Nebraska prairie she farms.

Alexandra’s character mirrors the land she, as the eldest child, inherited from her father and which she devotes her life to working. When other families give up, sell off, and move on, she doggedly remains through harsh winters and, against all likelihood, prospers as an unmarried woman managing a vast expanse of land.

Like the land, she remains both knowable and unknowable, at once harsh and majestic.

Possessing an external manner that is reticent, internally hers is an indomitable spirit. She is among the most inimitable of women to have ever appeared in print.

Is Undine Spragg Edith Wharton’s least admiral protagonist? Perhaps. But as well, she is her most beguiling.

With her modest mid-western roots and her hunger for something more, she personifies the American dream, only she incarnates its less noble form. Cunning and beautiful, she uses her every charm exclusively in service to her ambition.

There is something thoroughly modern about her self-belief, her perpetual reinvention. It’s impossible to look away as she ruthlessly forges her own future, defying expectations and conventions time and again. 

They say what goes around comes around; but when it comes to Undine Spragg we are constantly left wondering if the truism can hold.