I always identified a lot with Princess Marya from Tolstoy's War and Peace. Perhaps simply because she's one of the few female characters in literature that seems to truly have any depth at all.
What female characters does /lit/ consider the most well-written? (N.B. Well-written that is, not who's your literary manic pixie dream girl waifu)
Where does one go after War and Peace?
>>8268021
Shakespeare's Rosalind, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
I'm reading Balzac atm and he writes his women with a lot of sympathy and nuance, so hes worth a shot too I reckon
Pilar from For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Technically Estraven from The Left Hand of Darkness if you think about it
The protagonist from The Lover by Duras. The one who has the affair very young and then grows up. The mother from that story was good as well.
Honestly I can't really see the difference between male characters and female characters. I think people really overthink it. I don't think women are any better at writing women, but everyone just assumes they are. It's like how people thought that guy's poetry was better when he used a Chinese woman's name.
>not who's your literary manic pixie dream girl waifu
Agia from Gene "The Meme" Wolfe's catholic torture epics. She sounds like a handful.
>>8268515
Why exactly was Tolstoy so good at female characters?
I agree with you entirely about Anna Karenina too.
>>8268597
b/c he was a francoboo and women are well-represented in France's literary tradition
are you implying identification makes it well written?
Cathy Ames is an extraordinarily well written character and a great litmus test of whether someone's sexist.
>>8268597
His obsession with understanding other people ("morality")
>>8268721
Something the average 4channer could learn from
Emily Byrd Starr from the Emily of New Moon series.
She's an example on how to write a good feminist character. I can symphathize with her dream to become a writer in spite of her old-fashioned relatives keeping her down. Montgomery isn't taking her side entirely like so many feminist literature with rebellious female MCs. There are hilarious moments when she screws up and makes a joke out of herselfwhich makes her adorable. And I can see a lot of myself in her.
Also, Sara Crewe. The ideal introverted character.
The matriarch in To the Lighthouse, she illustrates pretty well how women end up being this sponge for everyone's issues and emotions.
>>8269367
Great suggestion
Nastasya filipovna
