Tahmima Anam on complicated literary heroines A list of female characters who confound and irritate us while providing the most satisfying glimpses of human complexity must begin with Jane Eyre (1847). Jane is pious, though heretical in her desire for equality, dutiful yet outspoken, compassionate but with exacting moral standards, and capable of heroic endurance. Rushdie fans are divided between those who believe Midnight's Children (1981) is his masterpiece, and those who prefer The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). I fall into the latter camp, because at its centre lies the mercurial, maniacal, Tasmanian devil of a mother, Aurora Zogoiby. In Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), we meet Sethe in all the pivotal moments of her life: as a child who knew nothing of her mother, as a young lover escaping her life of enslavement, then as a mother who will do anything to save her child from a life of bondage. She is difficult to love, impossible not to admire. When Anna Karenina (1877) finally leaves her husband for Count Vronsky, all we want is for her to find happiness with her lover. But it isn't to be: having chosen romantic attachment above all else, Anna is condemned to a life of loneliness and social exclusion. Fragile, sexually ambiguous, and with her heart in the past, Mrs Dalloway (1925) is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. Yet she sparkles with life, prompting her old lover to note her presence, simply and repeatedly: "there she was."