Howard Jacobson's 5 favorite literary heroines

The Man Booker Prize-winning author recommends books by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy

Howard Jacobson

Persuasion by Jane Austen (Dover, $2.50). I suffer from heroine addiction. The novels that moved me most as a young man were always about women in whom the desire to be treated justly, to be acknowledged, and to find fulfillment in love burns like a fire, and they remain my favorites to this day. Jane Austen possesses the power to make you feel as you read that nothing else matters in the world but the happiness of her heroines. Anne Elliot's happiness hangs by a thread in Persuasion, and the reader knows no peace until it is secured.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Dover, $3.50). Jane Eyre ranks at the top among all 19th-century English heroines. I've recently seen Cary Fukunaga's new film adaptation, and was reminded how passionately principled, articulate, and marvelously angry this novel is.

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