Heroines of fiction

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William Dean Howells (1837-1920), autodidact from the farmlands of Ohio, was a realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". In his "Editor's Study" column at The Atlantic Monthly and, later, at Harper's, he formulated and disseminated his theories of "realism" in literature. Heroines of Fiction is a study of the characters of the female protagonists in the Anglo-American novel from Defoe to James. It is something of an anomaly in Howells's canon of literary texts for reasons of style, rhetorical stance, and purpose. As a critic, Howells was less concerned with psychological or social realism than with an ideal of human character, and in this collection, expands that concern with character within a thesis asserting that "a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant." These character 'portraits' illustrate Howells impressions of which of these female characters are important, and how this status is achieved.