Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.
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Articles on My favourite fictional character
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Alexander Howard stumbled on spymaster John Le Carré soon after relishing a James Bond film. And he was instantly hooked on George Smiley, Le Carré’s unglamorous bureaucrat-detective – an unlikely hero.
Maggie O'Farrell’s homage to The Yellow Wallpaper inhabits a ‘difficult’ young woman who survives tragedy in colonial India and is incarcerated by her family for refusing gender and social norms.
Half-wild Lyra from Northern Lights was the first female character who felt real to Jane Gleeson-White. Then she met Elena Ferrante’s ‘ferocious, filthy, quicksilver’ Lila, a more complex version.
Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie navigates dating as a Black woman, living in a Black body, and what it’s like to straddle two cultures while never really feeling as though you fit.
Edwina Preston tells why her favourite literary heroine is Seven Little Australians’ Judy Woolcot and her ‘bone-true authenticity of self’ – beating fellow tomboys Jo March and Anne Shirley.
John Banville calls Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill’s Hotel, ‘an inexplicably neglected 20th-century masterpiece’. Carol Lefevre shares her fascination with William Trevor’s ‘crazed’ photographer Ivy Eckdorf.
Top contributors
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Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
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PhD Candidate and Casual Academic, The University of Queensland
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Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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Lecturer, Creative Writing, Queensland University of Technology
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PhD candidate, English Literature, Australian National University
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Adjunct Lecturer, English and Creative Writing, UNSW Canberra, UNSW Sydney
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PhD Candidate, Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
