The Lady and the Bandit by Libertad Delgado

Yet she gets chosen to serve the evil sorcerer…sounds too cliché? Don’t worry, Naomi Novik is a master at working with and subverting those clichés. Heroine is certainly not as attractive as her beautiful best friend or any of the other girls in her village. Spends the majority of the book as an old woman. Heroine perceives herself as unattractive.

Not fantasy but Jane needs to be on this list as she´s mother of all ugly heroines. This article also makes some good points about the importance of ugly heroines. (x)Īnd here is my personal list (in no particular order): Books So, where are all the “ugly” ladies in literature?” I mean, there are plenty of male heroes in literature who get by with the looks of Cyrano de Bergerac, or Quasimodo, or Oscar Wao, or, more often than not, with no idea at all as to their general attractiveness.

It’d be nice if the occasional lady in literature was just, you know, a person, rather than some silk-skinned goddess or one of the other many adjectives that plague the women of literature who are just trying to go about their business of surviving whatever cruel plots the author has devised for them. “Ever notice how most heroines in novels just happen to also be devastatingly gorgeous? As if their long, flowing hair or sparkling eyes somehow make them more worthy of the title of heroine? Of course, given that so many classic popular novels about women were written about men, it kind of makes sense that literature would be so full of idealized versions of women that dude authors kind of wish they could hook up with. Some good examples for ugly heroines are featured in this article (x) A very specific list of books and movies with unconventional looking/conventionally unattractive heroines

The Lady and the Bandit by Libertad Delgado