The Future is Female

To mark International Women's Day, we celebrate some of literature's most inspiring, fearless and radical fictional female characters.

Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, could be forgiven for taking a rather grim view on life. As the property of a Commander, her job is to provide the Republic of Gilead with children. However, there is resistance in humour (and sometimes also humour in resistance) and Offred never misses a chance to channel her rage into dark comedy and sarcasm, whether describing herself as a ‘lady reduced circumstances’ (emphasis on the ‘lady’) and a two-legged womb’ – or playing with the Commander’s mind via the medium of Scrabble.

Her biggest achievement, however, is to keep her soul intact in this rather too familiar dystopia, where women have been systematically and rapidly stripped of all their rights. ‘Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.’ A heroine for our times. Praise be, indeed.

Dry wit. Cool judgement. Ruthless clarity. These are Kainene Ozobia’s weapons of choice. The sharper-tongued, less adored twin to the beautiful Olanna, Kainene learned early that charm is overrated; competence is better. While others flirt, dream or debate politics over drinks, Kainene runs businesses, exposes hypocrisy and skewers pretension with a single devastating remark.

When the Biafran War tears Nigeria apart, that hard pragmatism becomes something more formidable. Faced with starvation and chaos, Kainene takes charge of a refugee camp, bargaining for supplies and confronting indifferent officials with the same icy resolve she once used in boardrooms. Beneath the sardonic humour lies a fierce, unsentimental compassion. Kainene does not talk about doing good – she simply does it.

In a world collapsing into violence and hunger, she remains what she has always been: clear-eyed, unflinching and impossible to ignore. A heroine who never needed to raise her voice to command a room.

Lying. Scheming. Dissembling. Poisoning. This is what passes for core curriculum at Jordan College, Oxford, and Lyra ‘Silvertongue’ Belacqua is brilliant at all of them. Luckily, she also picks up – though not, it has to be said, from her Oxford tutors – courage and determination, fierce loyalty and a resolute spirit in the face of giant bears, all essential skills if you’re planning to go to war against your father, your mother, oh, and the ranged forces of evil in the multiverse.

Whether this scrappy, dirty, belligerent girl is discovering the truth behind her parentage, overcoming fear and separation from her beloved daemon to enter the Land of the Dead, or closing windows between worlds, she mostly seems less a human than a force of nature. ‘Can is not the same as must,’ she points out to armoured bear Iorek Byrnison. ‘But if you must and you can,’ retorts Lyra Silvertongue, ‘then there’s no excuse.’

‘Esteem him!’ shrieks Marianne Dashwood to her stoical sister Elinor. ‘Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse than cold-hearted!’ Elinor was only trying to clarify her feelings for Edward Ferrars, the love of her life, but it’s hard not to sympathise with Marianne: certainly anyone who’s had a Sensible Older Sister who decides to deal with heartbreak by ‘busily employ[ing] herself’ rather than going into a glorious decline will relate. But if her stoicism can be frustrating, it is hard not to admire Elinor: her ‘strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment’, her sense of duty and her supreme self-control.

Witness how calm she is under fire when she hears that the ‘ignorant and illiterate’ Lucy Steele is engaged to Edward: with a ‘composed voice under which was concealed an emotion and distress beyond any thing she had ever felt before.’ For this, we can forgive her for being the kind of control freak who, were she around today, would likely be getting up at 5am to do yoga and colour-code her sock drawer.

Who is your favourite Folio female character? Tell us @foliosociety on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok