stack of books

Girl Power: My Favorite Novels about Brave and Faithful Women

(OR, BOOKS TO GIRD YOU WITH THE GRACE TO ENDURE)

I DISCOVERED my dear friend Esther on a day when I felt ready to quit in just about every area of my life. With a book deadline looming and three chapters still to be written, the imminent arrival of holiday guests, taxes to be done, and a house to be cleaned, I greatly wanted to abandon ship. What I would do or where I would go I did not know, but remain in my life as it was, I certainly would not. My angst was compounded by the fact that I had spent the last six months in transition, unable to determine the right job, location, or future for my life. Worn in body from work and travel, weary in mind from the uncertain days, I had come to the end of myself. Then the phone rang with news of a missing tax document (there is nothing that makes me feel existentially useless more quickly than doing my taxes). I finished the call, closed my computer, and retired to my room to plan my resignation from the responsible life.

Esther, blessed girl, halted me in my steps. She met me as I sank into my chair, hot faced and nervous. In need of mental focus, I reached for the worn and dusty book from the top of a stack I had recently found at Goodwill. My interest at that time ran toward Dickens, and the book I opened was Bleak House. The first chapters had been a bit difficult; my reading until then had been distracted and languid, and I expected no better of the story than a few moments of calm. But Esther entered the room of my mind that day—the calm, kind woman who is, I think, the unlikely heroine of Dickens’s tale. So potent was her presence on the pages of that old book that half an hour had passed before I glanced up again.

When I did, it was with a sigh of resignation; apparently I couldn’t in all honor quit the responsible life after all. My imagination was filled and my heart challenged by the story of this girl who determined to bring order and love into every place she dwelled, despite her own past as an unwanted child. Born in disgrace, raised by a mad and resentful aunt, cast on the charity of strangers, Esther still managed to become the heart of warmth and practicality at the center of Dickens’s mad and beautiful story. Her response after a devastating illness struck me to the core:

I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass, and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.

I finished the chapter and looked up amid a great quiet. I suddenly felt that the abandonment of my own tasks, or even great complaint, was not as necessary as I had imagined. Perhaps these responses were even cowardly. Throughout the next month, I mentally dwelled in Esther’s story. She was my comrade in arms in the difficult endeavor of life. Her presence punctuated my difficult days with an image of grace in the midst of weariness. I felt we were companions in a sisterhood of faithful women who brought order to the whirlwind of life. Esther helped me to see the constant round of dishes and ordinary work as the realm in which beauty is recaptured and love made tangible. She helped me, in the middle of a pile of tax documents, to look out my window, to take joy in the wonder of mountain sunlight and the calming steam of my morning cup of tea. She helped me to choose strength and to receive the fact of existence as a gift; to resist the modern idea that my frustrated feelings should rule my choices or even my outlook. In her quiet way, she empowered me to see myself as blessed; to recognize grace in the love of the family that so often irritated me in that season; to experience normal, responsible life as a story in which my own laughter, my own peace of heart could create the same joy that Esther so richly brought to hers.

But Esther is just one of a bevy of fictional women whose faithfulness, courage, and strong spirits have shaped my character and challenged me to act in a redemptive way. The list below is composed of the novels whose female protagonists stand beside me to this day with words and lives that challenge me to follow their example. Their courage is of countless kinds: of determined love amid the ordinary, of moral bravery in wartime, of artistic daring, or of spiritual endurance, but each models the power of a woman whose choices reflect her loving and creative heart. I still hope to be counted among their number when my own life’s story is someday told.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Elinor is the character I love in this book—a woman of deep feeling challenged by the death of her father, the care of her mother and sisters, and a prolonged (and seemingly permanent) separation from the man she loves, who yet resolves, “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself.” This book is a fascinating exploration, through Austen’s gentle, incisive narrative, of the nature of true love. Is love to “burn,” as the passionate young Marianne claims? Is it a deep and abiding friendship, as Elinor, the older sister, knows? And how ought true love to affect the lives of those connected to it? A novel that explores self-giving, sorrow, and the nature of passion and of patience, it tells the story of two sisters who are some of my favorites in literature as they come to terms with society, each other, their difficult suitors, and their own understanding of love in its truest sense.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

This is a strange novel, both dark and soaring in its depiction of a young woman with an indomitable spirit, raised without love and left to her fate as a belittled governess, but certain of love’s power and the strength of her own conscience and desiring soul. Considered scandalous to its Victorian audience at the time of its publication in 1847, this novel depicts Jane’s sojourn as a governess in a mysterious country house; her unconventional love for its master, Mr. Rochester; and her even more unconventional boldness in describing the strength, capacity, and freedom of a woman’s inner mind. I love Jane’s passionate response to Rochester, her insistence that he treat her as an intellectual and moral equal: “I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal—as we are!” A haunting love story, slightly gothic in touch, but masterful in its insistence upon truth, frankness, and integrity.

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

A novel of artistry and vocation, this is the story of Thea Kronborg, who has a soul as big as the skies of her Western American world in the early days of the twentieth century. This is a woman who “only want[s] impossible things,” a woman in whom music grows and burgeons, longing for release. Often considered autobiographical, this is a story of an artist coming into her powers, wrestling with ambition and desire almost beyond her grasp, and facing the discouragement that dogs the heels of the creative life. I love the fierceness of Thea’s spirit, her defiance of discouragement. As one who creates, I appreciate the realistic portrayal of the hard work vital to artistic success and the way one great vision always inspires another.

Also by Cather:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The story that so challenged me to faithfulness, this is Dickens’s dark, vivid, intertwined tale of the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a lawsuit regarding a disputed inheritance whose complications entwine the lives of the orphaned Esther Summerson with the cousins Ada and Richard as they are all taken in by the kindhearted Mr. Jarndyce. A story of mystery and murder, a critique of a corrupt justice system, and an exploration of the forces that shape lives toward generosity or greed, this Dickensian novel is a marvel. And Esther, with her compassion, calm, and daily good sense, is one of my favorite characters in literature.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

This book is so good I’ll risk including it in two lists. This is one of my dozen best-beloveds, but it is also a marvelous novel of womanhood, so I couldn’t keep from mentioning it here. As I said in my earlier review (found on page 49), there are several marriages at the heart of the story. The women in each of these—Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary Garth—are studies in the ways a woman’s choices and her responses to difficulty, challenge, and love both form her own powerful character and have infinite and continuing influence on the lives of each person she touches. I have rarely encountered such a profound and insightful exploration of feminine character and influence.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge

You have already encountered Goudge as one of my great favorites, but this story is one I return to for spiritual sustenance again and again. This is the tale of Mary, a competent and accomplished woman in London who inherits a country home and abruptly decides to leave the whirl of modern life behind. Her startling choice leads her to a radically altered life shaped by the deep thoughtfulness of the countryside and the journey she begins in reading the journals of the brave mentally ill woman who lived there before her. For me, Goudge’s story is almost devotional, a riveting narrative that traces the making of one woman’s soul in the wild solitude of mental illness and follows another woman on a journey of quiet revelation. At the moment I have a quote from the book as the background of my laptop screen: “There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, ‘Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.’ . . . If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.”

Two from Galilee: The Story of Mary and Joseph by Marjorie Holmes

I first encountered this fictional retelling of the events surrounding the Christmas story when I was a teenager. I was riveted by Mary and by the rich, girlish humanity with which the author describes her love for Joseph, her loyalty to her sometimes-difficult family, and her personal engagement with the Yahweh of her people. This book was one of the first to liven me to Mary’s intelligence, strength, and what Denise Levertov, in her beautiful poem “Annunciation,” termed her courage, as the author imaginatively portrays the rare qualities necessary for one young girl to partner with God in revealing the love behind creation anew.

The Emily Series by L. M. Montgomery

The Emily books present a character in some ways similar to Anne of Green Gables—an imaginative orphan girl sent to live with two maiden aunts—but Emily’s character wrestles with loneliness and discouragement, with the burning sense of a vocation to write that made this series instrumental in helping me come to terms with my own teenage identity. The Emily books get to the heart of what I felt as a young writer, trying to capture the wonder I saw in the beauty of the world (what Emily calls her “flash”) even as I began to wrestle with the reality of suffering, of loneliness, and of my own capacity for darkness.

Two of the things I value about the Emily books are their honesty and their kindness. Their honesty lies in their portrayal of the frustration Emily feels at being misunderstood; her scorn for some of the sillier social constrictions of her age; her difficulty in disciplining herself to write, to work, to hope. Their kindness lies in Emily’s insight into the people around her—her refusal to simply resent the aunt who most frustrates her, her gratefulness for friendship when it comes, her capacity to find humor and interest in the most ordinary of souls. In her stubborn, hopeful, amused walk through her teenage years, Emily was my companion on the road to adulthood and the writing life.

Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

Imagine if you were a middle-aged woman on a farm altogether fed up with caring for an old house and an ungrateful brother, when a charming little wagon with a bookshop on wheels rolled into your yard. Imagine, further, that you bought this movable wonder on the spot and set off posthaste for a new life both gypsy and literary in nature. Good. Now go finish the tale in this endearing novel.

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter

This is a book whose delight is heightened for me by the fact that it was one of the novels my mother and I read aloud together in our special “girls only” times when we stole away from the clamor of the boys. I returned to it in adulthood to discover its power afresh, to rejoice in its portrayal of the strong-hearted Elnora, and to delight in a greater knowledge of its author. A Girl of the Limberlost follows Elnora Comstock, impoverished and neglected, whose home lies in the many-splendored Limberlost swamp of northern Indiana. Determined to gain an education, she turns for help to the swamp world she knows like the inside of her own heart, collecting the fascinating moths of the Limberlost to sell as specimens to collectors. Aided by the inimitable and generous Bird Woman—part scientist, part poet, and part ecologist—Elnora grows into a woman with “a compound of self-reliance, hard knocks, heart hunger, unceasing work, and generosity. There was no form of suffering with which the girl could not sympathize, no work she was afraid to attempt, no subject she had investigated she did not understand. These things combined to produce a breadth and depth of character altogether unusual.”

This book was one of those, like the Anne books, that met me in the formative years of girlhood and modeled what determination, spunk, gentleness, and a holy hunger for life could look like in a young woman. There is a reveling in the beauty of the world in this book, such a hearty faith in what may be accomplished by determination. A bit more research introduced me to the marvel of the author herself, a real-life bird woman, who, like Elnora, begged God to “help me to unshackle and expand my soul to the fullest realization of Your wonders.” Porter’s work as a self-trained naturalist and conservationist meant the preservation of the riches of the actual Limberlost, along with novels that led her readers to the wonders of nature.

Also by Stratton-Porter:

Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy by Sigrid Undset

Undset’s story of Kristin, a medieval woman of deep religious faith and long endurance, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. Riveting from a historic point of view, as Undset draws deeply on Nordic myth and culture and crafts a novel of both gritty reality and beauty, it is even more compelling for the depth of its religious insight, as it examines the complexities of Kristin’s difficult life as daughter, wife, and mother. She is an image of womanhood in its power, its frailty, and its capacity for strength and beauty.