The new community hooked_on_heroines has an entry which asks about your first Awesome Female Character during your childhood. Mine wasn't from a book for children at all, but I read the novel in question and its sequels from the time I was eight onwards, so it totally counts.

So: my first AFC was Angelique (Sancé de Monteloup), main character in a series of historical novels by Anne Golon. Now, at that point I had just discovered historical novels and read pretty much everything from so called high literature to utter fluff. The Angelique novels usually get defined by dictionaries as entertaining trash. I always found that somewhat condescending, and not just because reading them meant I had a pretty good idea about the Who Was Who during the time of Louis XIV. which came in handy when we got to Colbert and mercantilism in school years later. No, it's because the novels, while not great art, present an entertaining ensemble of characters and a heroine who, now that I look back, managed to avoid an amazing number of clichés and somewhat spoiled me for other heroines in historical romances. How so?

For starters, while Angelique as most romance heroines tend to be is beautiful, she's no damsel in distress. She also gets married, has children and loses her husband before the first half of the first book (German edition, which as I later found out encompasses actually two books of the French original - but I didn't know that as a child!) is over, and then has to employ major survival skills for both herself and her children. Anne Golon basically lets her main character go from noblewoman to beggarwoman (literally - that entire section of the Parisian underworld made my child self be dissappointed when I read Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame later, because his take on the same subject seemed a weak copy without interesting women - well, I was too young to check years of origin and literary status of author!) to successful 17th century middleclass businesswoman and back to nobility, and she sells that via characterisation. Angelique was the first heroine I encountered whose story didn't only not end with marriage but who, when her beloved was taken from her, had a life afterwards and used a combination of courage, organizational skills, talent at improvisation and force of personality to get back on her feet, along with those depending on her. She also, as opposed to Juliette Benzoni's heroines, Cathérine and Marianna, whom I encountered at the same time, was not a masochist about her love life. (Seriously: both Cathérine and Marianne are in love with men who treat them worse than the Faitful Griselda gets treated by her husband. Even as a pre-feminist girl, I found the fact they kept pining after these guys somewhat incomprehensible.) I wasn't used to women who had sex with someone other than the novel's clearly designated hero, let alone women who enjoyed this.

While we're talking sexuality: in the fourth (German edition, fifth in the original French) novel, Angelique in revolt, our heroine, after nearly becoming the king's mistress and deciding that life as a maitresse en titre was not for her, as well as a trip through the Mediterranean when she discovers her first husband is still alive, becomes entangled in a rebellion against Louis XIV, which she co-leads. Not suprisingly, given that despite a romance heroine's luck, she needs to remain within the bounds of historical probality, they lose. What is surprising - not in terms of probability in an uprising but in terms of what usually happens and doesn't happen to novel heroines - is that in this novel, she gets raped, and the way the aftermath is treated. Which is way more mature and responsible than how far better written books handle similar situations. There is no magic cure by healing sex. She's pregnant, she tries her best to have an abortion, which does not work, and when the child is born, her first impulse is to abandon it; the slow coming to terms with what has happened and eventual - after a long time and in a gradual development we can follow - ability to see her daughter as her child, not the rapists', is psychologically sound, gripping to read, and further keeps the character three-dimensional. She's not a saint or such a wonder in strength that she gets over being raped without effort, she's a woman to whom something terrible has happened and who has to work to deal with it.

Mind you: the Angelique novels do have their flaws even within the entertainment they want to be. The negative characterisation of Monsieur, the king's homosexual brother, is perhaps unavoidable (having read biographies and letters by now, it's hard to find a more positive thing to say about the guy than that as opposed to his uncle, the previous Monsieur, who never met a conspiracy he didn't like, he at least wasn't a non-stop unsuccessful schemer - but he was pretty vicious), but it means the most prominent gay character comes across as an Evil Homosexual. As opposed to, say, Jude Morgan's The King's Touch, which also features Monsieur as a villain but balances this by simply including a sympathetic gay character as well, the only other prominent homosexual character in these novels, however, is also a villain (a female and, as opposed to Monsieur, fictional one, who shows up in book 9, which was also where I stopped reading the series). It wasn't until years later (when I was 14 and read Marion Zimmer Bradley, to be precise) that I encountered sympathetic gay characters in fiction; the Angelique novels could leave you with the impression they were all evil.

Doesn't change the fact Angelique was my first AFC, and that I'll always be grateful I "met" her at an impressionable age. (She also was my first case of watching film versions and going "what have you done, film makers? Where's the awesome?") I still can't visit Paris, or her home province, the Poitou, without thinking of her. Or, for that matter, drink hot chocolate, for this was how she started to earn money again, by introducing chocolate to Paris. If this woman wasn't awesome, who is?