To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Katherine Heiny, author of the forthcoming ‘Single, Carefree, Mellow‘ explains why she relates to one of fiction’s most famous heroines…
‘She’s a murderer — but that’s not why I’m in awe of her.
She’s a rebel and a feminist and courageous and resourceful — but that’s not why I admire her.
She’s charming and seductive and irresistible to men — but that’s not why I want to be like her. (Well, that’s not the whole reason, anyway.)
She’s vain and selfish and manipulative — but that’s not why she fascinates me.
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Judith Claire Mitchell, author of the forthcoming ‘A Reunion of Ghosts’ celebrates the indefatigable Madame Manec from Anthony Doerr’s ‘All The Light We Cannot See’…
‘I live in a world that has little use for elderly women, and yet, if I’m lucky, an elderly woman is what I will someday be. I think about this from time to time. It’s not that I’m horrified by the thought of ageing. I’m actually intrigued by it. I’m a novelist, after all. I’m interested in how stories unfold, how they twist and turn, how they conclude. This applies to my own story as well.
What disturbs me is the culture’s dismissal of women who have the temerity to grow old, and the way that, at a certain point, a cloak of invisibility falls upon women, a cloak that is heavy and hard to shrug off and can even, I fear, come to feel comfortable.
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Tom Killingbeck explains why he is still haunted by’ The Virgin Suicides’ Cecilia Lisbon…
On the first page of Jeffrey Eugenides’s debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, thirteen-year-old Cecilia Lisbon tries to kill herself in the bath, ‘slitting her wrists like a Stoic’. In one short, shocking paragraph, Eugenides introduces a character who has remained indelibly etched on my mind ever since I read the novel as a teenager, like initials on the bark of a tree. Read more…
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Justine Gold explains the appeal of Flora 717, the humble insect at the heart of Laline Paull’s ‘The Bees’…
‘Flora thrills and frustrates me. Hatched into a world where deformity can mean death, Flora essentially defies the Hive’s eternal law – ‘Accept, Obey, Serve’ – from the very beginning of The Bees, through her physical strength and attributes. She kicks and forces herself out of her cell, is ‘obscenely ugly’ and ‘excessively large’, and is able to speak, while others of her kin are mute.
To celebrate WOM4N, we asked several of our authors and staff to share their favourite female characters from the 4th Estate bookshelves. Here, Emmanuella Kwenortey explains how she is ever-inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Aunty Ifeoma from Adichie’s award-winning novel Purple Hibiscus.
‘As a woman, to live independently in the deeply patriarchal society that is 1970s Nigeria is one feat; but to be a single mother, academic and financial breadwinner is quite another. Aunty Ifeoma from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s award-winning Purple Hibiscus is one of those rare characters who you can do nothing but admire. Following the devastating death of her husband, Ifeoma does something not all women are capable of doing; she dusts herself down, picks herself up and carries her burden, her children and their lives towards salvation.
