Brian Moore’s Eponymous Heroines

This feminist study is an innovative reassessment of Brian Moore’s five novels featuring eponymous heroines. The author reviews previous interpretations, exposing their sexist bias. Highlighting Moore’s empathetic insights, she also discusses the novelist’s limitations. She compares Moore’s heroines to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, reinterpreted by Mieke Bal, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina revisioned by Aritha van Herk, and to female characters created by Canadian women writers. Rejecting biocriticism, the study focuses on Moore’s biblical, Victorian and modernist inspirations, and his indebtedness to film. Ideas of female thinkers illuminate the condition of Moore’s female protagonists.