Flawed heroines

Flawed heroines - do you like your main female character to have flaws? Or do you want perfection - someone you can admire and want to be? Funny, isn't it, that some of the most brilliant literary classics actually feature flawed heroines - female characters who would probably be slated by reviewers for being petulant or selfish or deceitful... and yet... that is surely what made the story?

Example - Catherine in Wuthering Heights! I would imagine a lot of people would say she was selfish and even downright nasty to poor Heathcliffe. There wasn't a lot of tenderness in Wuthering Heights. And yet it is a love story and one of the best of all time. I can only imagine how Emily Bronte would get panned on Amazon by readers who hated Cathie, though....

And then there is Becky Sharp - what a piece of work eh? Oh and Scarlett O'Hara in 'Gone With the Wind' - a study in histrionic personality disorder if ever there was one! Oh and Emma by Jane Austen - manipulation hardly covers it! Not to mention all those pathetic creatures in Mills and Boon - which sell millions!

As a writer I suppose we must decide with our fiction - do we present Mrs Wonderful with just the odd little quirk like um... being too generous or a little bit ditsy? Or do we show real characters in fictional situations, and how she must address those issues in order to develop? I suppose I chose the latter with Sam Sweet in Expected. And because of that there is controversy and some people don't like her. She's flawed - yes she is. But she knows it and she laughs at herself and she's trying to get better...maybe in the sequel I'll help her along a little more....

Until next time....
Expected