Bad Girls, or, How Bad Is Too Bad?
by Flo Nicoll on December 2nd, 2011, 12:14pm
Morning all!
Tomorrow, I have my first ever winter wedding – it’s going to be so magical! In fact, it’s going to be Mills-&-Boon-Christmas-romance magical, from the beautiful Christmas bride, her handsome groom to the fairytale setting. SO EXCITED! And also hoping madly for some miracle snow, just to make it even more perfect.
But before the wedding comes the hen party. And what a party it was. Dolled up in our 1920s flapper-style outfits, learning how to make lethally strong cocktails (thank you, oh hen party god, for the blind eye our cocktail waiter turned to the many additional shots added), it was a night of amazingly fun mayhem. Nothing like some fancy dress to get rid of those inhibitions!
Wobbling home, slightly worse for wear and maybe with a kebab (*ashamed blush), I remember wondering if you’d ever catch a self-respecting M&B heroine in a similar state. Now, I love a bad girl heroine – as long as I understand where it’s coming from, there’s no behaviour I can’t get on board with. Rudeness, a criminal past, a chequered romantic history… bring it on. I especially have a real weakness for a bit of drunken outrageousness - always so much funnier and more scandalous in books than real life!
But that’s just me. It could be that you’re put off by heroines who disgrace themselves on a regular basis, and find such behaviour a real barrier to identifying with them.
So my question to you this week is… when it comes to heroines, how bad is too bad?
At what point do you personally stop enjoying a heroine’s feistiness, and find her behaviour off-putting? What could a heroine do that would make her, in your eyes, completely irredeemable: be the other woman, kill someone, walk away from their child? Or perhaps the badder the better?! Any stand-out examples that you want to share? My personal faves are (as always!) Jilly Cooper’s Octavia, but also Kristin Scott-Thomas’s character in I’ve Loved You So Long – she’s gone to jail for killing her child, but when you find out why…well, your judgment just shifts.
Now, I’m absolutely playing devil’s advocate here, but we’d love to know where your personal limits were – so get thinking!
(And just in case anyone was worrying, don’t worry, we’re all going to be very well-behaved at the wedding!)
Love Flo x
I LOVE a bad girl
I absolutely love waiting to see how an author manages to redeem a bad girl. I was recently on a truly fabulous panel (alongside Marion Lennox, Kelly Hunter, Anne Gracie & Sarah Mayberry - all of whom were utterly inspiring and so much more eloquent than me under pressure) and we were in the midst of discussing heroines when I casually threw out the comment 'no heroine could ever be too bad to be redeemed'! The audience then started to think up out the most controversial and outrageous bad-girl themes, and one by one I was explaining how they could be motivated, and therefore made sympathetic. I thought I was doing pretty well...until one lady asked me how a heroine could come back from being cruel to animals. I have to say, she had me stumped! However, whilst I wouldn't remotely advocate it, I still think that in the hands of the right author, it could be pulled off!
I think I've always secretly known I was a bad-girl heroine kind of reader - I always preferred Jessica to Elizabeth when I was devouring Sweet Valley. She was just SO much more fun!
Lucy Gilmour, Romance HQ!
I don't believe in limits!
I don't believe in limits! Except the 50K word kind
I do think some issues might be too big to tackle believably in a category.
I PREFER a flawed heroine, mostly because I can't relate to people who are too nice. (will ignore what that says about me) As always, it's all in the delivery and understanding the motivations.
Amy Strnad w/a Aimee Carson
www.aimeecarson.com
Secret History of a Good Girl Harlequin Presents Extra Feb. 2012
Dare She Kiss And Tell? UK Modern June 2012
I don't want to read a
I don't want to read a heroine who is cruel - she can be snarky, but not deliberately cruel to someone, except perhaps the hero if he deserves it, and eventhen I want to see some motivation, some feelings behind it. I also think heroines should be human, but would have difficulty with a heroine who's v sexually active with secondary characters, unless there was some love involved...oh dear, that makes me sound v prudish, but for me the emotions have to play a part!