To ask for your favourite literary heroines?

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I've just finished a book and I'm looking for inspiration.

My all time favourite is Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind. I love Rebecca (from Rebecca) too, and Cathy Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights.

Amber from Forever Amber is a recent discovery too. Any recommendations for what to read next?

Bit offbeat but what about Clarissa Dalloway? I know she may not be popular with the feminists amongst us, but it was leaps and bounds ahead of its time with approaches to mental health and sexuality/bisexuality.

As soon as i saw your title OP i thought scarlett o'hara.

She's in a man's world and is ruthless, unforgiving and focused. For all her faults i love her!

Jane Eyre for sure. Her put down of St John Rivers - “oh I will give my heart to God. You do not want it” has me cheering every time I read it.
Penelope Keeling in The Shell Seekers. Keeps going even after the love of her life has died.
All the Walsh women in Marian Keyes’ books - funny, flawed and human.

Ida Arnold from Brighton Rock.
And definitely Anne Shirley.

The Provincial Lady from The Diary of a Provincial Lady, so obsessed I’m submitting my masters thesis on the book on Friday!

Why do so many of you love Becky Sharpe? She's a nasty cow.

Miss Jane Marple.

She always saw through the bullshit.

Fevvers from Nights At The Circus. Such a fabulous woman.

Scarlett O Hara, her biggest flaw was not realising that Ashley was a wimp. A strong, ruthless, determined single minded woman
Lisbeth Salander all three books in the Millennium series
Carta Graham, the High Flyer
Lyle Christie, Glittering Images

I ve always loved Scarlett O Hara. She was awesome, ahead of her time and beautiful.
Pippi Longstocking was a favourite of mine as a child.
Katniss Everdene definitely.
Fran Lattimer in The Plague Trilogy by Jean Ure. Her whole life is upside down, parents dead from a plague while she s at summer camp, whole of the UK in a terrifying apocalypse but she stays calm and copes with her batshit friend Harriet (who is a super pita) and survives along with shahid who she bravely nurses through the disease and later marries.
Becky Sharp.
Maggie Tulliver.
Miranda from The Tempest.
I hate most of the Malory Towers girls except Jean, Sally and Mary Lou and later Bill, Clarissa Irene and Belinda.
Alicia s a bully and Darrell needs anger management. Cant help feeling a bit sorry for poor old Gwen. The archetypal fat unpopular girl.

Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg
Ship Wayfarer/Lovelace (Becky Chambers - The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet & A Closed and Common Orbit)
Becky Sharpe precisely because she is a nasty cow and I am not (well, being menopausal may have changed things a bit)
The ship in the Ancillary Justice novels by Anne Leckie (I sense a theme ... )
Fevvers - The Night Circus
To Name but a few

A few more I like but I wouldn't call a couple of them heroines just women trying to survive in difficult times. Emma Bovary a woman trapped in a unhappy marriage and also Anna Karenina who was unhappily married to an old man.

My favorite real life heroine has to be Vera Britain in Testament of Youth because I did History A level and I studied the 1st and 2nd World Wars. It was a very harrowing story about the needless deaths of young men in War World 1.

Scout from To Kill A Mocking Bird

Scarlett O'Hara
Jean Louise "Scout" Finch

I am currently re-reading I Capture the Castle for the eleventy billionth time. I love Cassandra.

Magdalen Vanstone. That woman could give Scarlett OHara a run for her money!

Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Agnes Nitt, Tiffany Aching

Jinian Footseer, Marjorie Westriding

Miriam in 1000 splendid suns
Anne Elliot
Charlotte Lucas
Scarlett

I like the Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales.
All those centuries ago, and she tells her male audience clearly that what women really want is respect!
One day, they might listen...

Loved Clarice Starling and Lisbeth Salander, too.

My favourites were always Estella from Great Expectations (perhaps an odd choice), Cordelia from King Lear, and Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.

Surprised Hermione Granger hasn’t been mentioned!

Jo March was my favourite as a child/young teen.
As an adult, without doubt, it's Celie from The Colour Purple. I'm surprised she's not been mentioned.

But we don’t actually know anything at all about Rebecca, OP. We never meet her, we just get post-mortem accounts of her from (1) people who only saw her angelic facade, (2) were in love with her and felt she could do no wrong (creepy, obsessive, underwear-preserving servant Mrs Danvers, boozy Jack-the-lad Favell) or (3) from her murderer, who needs to blacken her as far as possible to justify the fact that he shot his wife and disposed of her body!

My list would be Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Bronte’s masterpiece, Villette, Marian Halcombe, Fevvers, Harriet Vane, Kivrin Engel from Connie Willis’ The Domesday Book, Charlotte Mullen, and Helen Archer from Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices.

V I Warshawski

Brittle, genuine question but why do you like Charlotte Mullen? I think her character is brilliantly drawn but I think she’s a vile person.
The last scene when Lambert goes to ask her for money is a masterpiece of revenge.

Tess and Bathsheba