Yesterday I tweeted a comment about Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series and its lack of women characters. Got a lot of adverse comments, which is fine.
Got to wondering about American literature and female characters. I couldn't think of memorable characters written by dead American authors, except for Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. Hemingway's Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan also came to mind, but I'd have to go to Cather and Wharton for better characters.
It's sort of funny--I resist the idea that authors are restricted to writing only about their own, that a white male can't write a black woman, etc. But it does seem from my self-poll that similarity between writer and character makes a difference.
Searching google results in hits for English language works, so characters from Bronte, Austen, and Rowling come up, not to mention Chaucer.
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