Scarlett O’Hara and The Real Liddy James

Author of The Real Liddy James Anne-Marie Casey talks about likeability of female characters in literature. 

I studied English Literature at University and have had the privilege of adapting several great novels for stage and screen. What I have learned from the masters is that it is a character’s flaws that make them interesting. In fact, whenever I see the ‘likeability’ of a female character in a contemporary story discussed, I always wonder what Emily Brontë would have said if an editor had told her to ‘tone down’ Cathy Earnshaw’s behaviour,  or what Louisa M Alcott’s response to the idea that Jo March might be ‘a bit unfeminine’ would have been. They probably would have been nonplussed. In both those iconic portrayals, character is entirely action, by which I mean there are few deliberated choices for Cathy or Jo; their intrinsic natures, for good or bad, drive their stories in Wuthering Heights and Little Women.

As Liddy James, the eponymous heroine of my novel, and her story began to form in my mind, I feared that the vexed question of her appeal to the reader would rear its ugly head. She is, after all, a successful divorce lawyer, a workaholic and a single mother. (And in no sphere is the accusation of unlikeability more likely to occur than in a woman who is also a mother – someone once cheerfully told me that I was describing ‘disturbing maternal ambivalence’ when I thought I was just being truthful to my character’s inner life!)  The more I thought about Liddy and her flaws – stubbornness, selfishness, extreme compartmentalization – the more I looked around for similar female characters to guide me in depicting her. Then suddenly I remembered –

Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

To be clear, in no way is my book any sort of reworking of Margaret Mitchell’s classic, nor do I presume to compare my book to it. Indeed, only some readers may spot any parallels, but the more I wrote, the more it seemed to me that there was something of Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes in Liddy’s relationship with her ex-husband, Peter James. Melanie Wilkes, one of my favourite characters in all literature and film, (it is SO HARD to make a truly good person real without being nauseating!) seemed a natural model for Rose, Peter’s new partner. And who can write a charismatic and cruel, devastatingly attractive and un-tameable man without thinking of Rhett Butler of the ‘loving but lacerated heart’? Sebastian Stackallan is only one in a long line of (anti-) heroes inspired by him.

Apparently Mitchell had reservations about her creation and said that she had intended Melanie Wilkes to be the protagonist of her book, but Scarlett just took over the story!  She also said the theme of her book could be boiled down to one word: survival. Apart from the happy coincidence of their mutual Irish heritage, what I gave Liddy in honor of Scarlett was intelligence, resourcefulness, and the ability to use her gifts to survive. Contemporary Manhattan is a world away from Atlanta in the Civil War,(and of course a contemporary readership cannot help but react to the complicated and painful historical truths of the setting), but in narrative terms, Scarlett’s life force is the engine of Gone with the Wind. That kind of energy in a female character was something I hoped to create in The Real Liddy James.