Female characters meme

[oulfis]

Taking this from doctornerdington because it seemed like low-hanging fruit to re-establish a presence here on DW now that I am done travelling for a little while -- my ten favourite female characters, limiting myself to one character per source, in order of how rapidly I was able to think of them:

• Is is Elinor Dashwood? It must be somebody from Austen, and it's not Emma or Fanny, and surely not Marianne (poor thing), and I think not Elizabeth... is there enough to Jane or to Georgiana for me to claim them as a favourite? Oh! Anne Eliot. I love her the best.
• Cordelia Naismith, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Ekaterin Vorsoisson is also obviously dear to me but Cordelia saved my life)
• Oh, obviously, if we're talking precious life-saving literary talismans from one's youth, Hermione Granger
• Pepper Potts, actually, an under-explored personage of intense interest to me
• Too much children's literature is springing to mind; Sarah Crewe from A Little Princess, Ella from Ella Enchanted... let's give it to Emily Starr, who encompasses all of them for me.
• Emily Fox-Seton, by Frances Hodgson Burnett in The Making of a Marchioness (though Hester mesmerizes me more with each passing year) - technically not children's lit!
• Rosalind, in As You Like It (This is where I started to scroll through my "read" list on Goodreads and remember all the grown-up literature I actually do read)
• Cecilia, by Frances Burney (Evelina is a better novel than Cecelia I think, but I find Cecilia herself more interesting)
• Aquilina, in Venice Preserv'd (it was gonna be Belvidera but then I remembered the Nicky-Nacky scene)
• Lady Bracknell, in The Importance of Being Earnest (it turns out she's actually right most of the time?)
• Lucy Honeychurch, in A Room with a View
• Lavinia, in Ursula K. LeGuin's Lavinia and in the Aeneid
• ... oops, I'm well past 10 now, but what the heck, Hild in Hild and Katherine in Katherine are both magnificently dense characters, and now that I've made this list I don't want to cut people from it.

There. A stream-of-consciousness post which revealed to me that, actually, a lot of the really character-focused stuff I consume is about men. Or perhaps, a lot of the 18thC heroines I adore are all the same single character with different names, so it's hard to become attached to them individually?