Amara’s bio says that she “
writes historical romances that combine her passion for 19th-century literature and history with her addiction to happily ever afters.” I think we all approve of this. Her contribution to
Heroine Week is particularly interesting because it comes from the perspective of someone who is both an English scholar and an author.
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An Un-Heroic Heroine: Dorothea of Middlemarch by Amara Royce
As I prepared to write this contribution to Heroine Week, I started out with a very clear and confident focus: the heroism (or is it heroine-ism?) of Dorothea Brooke from George Eliot’s
Middlemarch (one of those “loose, baggy monsters” of a Victorian novel that you may have been assigned in high school or college). So, of course, the very first thing I did was go back through the novel to remind myself of why she is my favorite literary character. And that’s when I got all discombobulated.
