This is a fun list if you want to guess which you would pick and then check it out.
This is a fun list if you want to guess which you would pick and then check it out.
Having just finished reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in full after having only read excerpts way back when in high school or college, I too had Anna’s death at the top of my list.
And Bertha’s death in Jane Eyre came to mind too.
Others on my list that I was really surprised weren’t there:
Romeo & Juliet
Beth in Little Women
Miss Havisham in Great Expectations
Aslan!
Inspector Javert (Les Miserables)
Heathcliff
If movies count:
Bambi’s mother! 🙂
Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz (so much fun: I’m melting, I’m melting…..!)
Mrs. Wildfire, much better read than yours truly, would put Emma Bovary at the top of her list, with Anna Karenina second. One notable feature of this list is the preponderance of heroines–relatively recent ones at that. Agamemnon and Ajax don’t get a mention.
Agree with both of the above: what an idiosyncratic list. Wildfire having mentioned Agamemnon and Ajax, how about Hector? Surely there were better choices from Shakespeare. I’d put in a word for King Lear and Cordelia. Maybe Dante’s Ulysses? Since some of the choices are relatively obscure, how about Kirillov from Dostoevsky’s Demons? But then, novels have not been my thing.