Hallelujah. Bridget Jones, the original chick-lit heroine who has dominated popular fiction for the past decade is gone. In place of the neurotic, incompetent, chain-smoking singleton desperately searching for her Mr. Right, Bridget’s creator, Helen Fielding has come up with a new creation. Olivia Joules, her female spy is, according to Fielding’s publicist, an all-action arse-kicking, man-chewing heroine.

“Post 9/11 the idea of what a woman is has changed. It’s all about self-reliance and individualism, making your own decisions and not caring what people think of you,” she says.

Why has it taken an event as cataclysmic as the destruction of the Twin Towers to make publishers realise that women are more than pink-clad twin peaks? Why have we had a decade of whimpering, whingeing women in fiction when in real life our sex has gone from strength to strength, licking boys hollow in exams, powering ahead with careers and achieving personal and professional heights our mothers could only dream of? True, there have been a couple of all-action female heroines around. Sara Paretsky’s female detective, V.I.Warshawski, has continued to stir up some action in Chicago, as has Janet Evanovitch’s hilarious bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, currently on her ninth adventure and still stringing along two boyfriends in her native New Jersey. The rising young British novelist Anna Davis had her third novel, Cheet, about a promiscuous woman taxi-driver, snapped up for film by Anthony Minghella, and Terry Pratchett’s feisty witches garner him an enthusiastic female audience. Yet popular as these are, neither has achieved the sales or respectability of a hundred chick-lit heroines, most largely inspired by Helen Fielding’s original. Even Allison Pearson’s Kate Reddy, a far more upmarket and literary creation who holds down a high-powered job in the City as a mother of two, is ultimately shown as collapsing from the strain.

The irony is that a hundred years ago, the Victorians were producing far stronger heroines than any modern writers. What chick-lit heroine can hold a candle to Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett, who unlike her pale imitation Bridget Jones stands up to a desirable lover and heaps such witty scorn on him for his ungentlemanly behaviour that he becomes a reformed man? Who can match Charlotte Bronte’s formidably defiant Jane Eyre? What about Marian Halcombe in Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece The Woman in White? True, she may sport a small moustache, but she has such fire and courage that even the villainous Count Fosco is smitten by her charms. Where is a modern match to Thackeray’s social climber, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, who hurls her school leaving present from the carriage and transforms herself from impoverished Bohemian to Society hostess? Not, alas, to be found in Candace Bushnell’s latest offering.

The reluctance of both literary and popular novelists to portray heroines who are strong is a mystery, particularly given the kind of female characters we have seen in film during the past decade. From Ripley in Alien to Melanie Griffiths in Working Girl, from Lara Croft to Jinx in the latest James Bond movie, strong heroines have achieved iconic status. Disney’s Mulan, Belle in Beauty & the Beast, Elle in Legally Blonde, John Connor’s mother in Terminator, Sex & the City and Buffy the Vampire Slayer have all come marching into our consciousness as admirable, formidable and sexy. A generation of young women has grown up with the idea that, like Cat in Ten Things I Hate About You, they can be smart and tough and still get the most gorgeous guy in the school.

Yet any author who attempted to portray a strong heroine in a novel has been likely to get a rough ride. I know this from personal experience. My first novel, Foreign Bodies (1990), featured a heroine who was rude to her mother, ran away from home and lost her virginity. Big deal you might think – but no. Torrents of critical scorn and hatred were poured on my head for not creating a heroine who was sugar and spice and all things nice. Where Martin Amis and Irvine Welsh were hugely praised for their revolting, drug-taking, porn-reading heroes, it was an unforgivable transgression for a woman to portray another woman as even mildly difficult and adventurous.

The discrepancy between the Victorian heroine and the modern one was perfectly pointed up by AS Byatt’s Booker-winning novel, Possession (1990). Where the Victorian heroine, Christabel la Motte, was a lesbian poet who risked all to have an affair with her married lover, her descendant Maude is an academic who keeps her beautiful blonde hair tightly plaited and hidden away for fear of inciting feminist wrath. Her timidity is emblematic of the hostility my generation of women has had persistent trouble with. It isn’t men who have held us back, but our own terror that assertiveness is unattractive and unfeminine. That terror has now been routed, and with it a sub-genre of fiction that has fed women’s fantasies of passivity. Olivia Joules, your hour has come.

Sunday Times Style magazine, September 2003

Top Five Classic Heroines:

Elizabeth Bennet, Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Marian Halcombe, The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
Betsey Trotwood, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair, William Thackeray

Top Five Modern Heroines:

V.I. Warshawski (series) Sara Paretsky
Stephanie Plum (series)Janet Evanovitch
Cheet (Cheet,) Anna Davis
Cordelia Gray (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman) PD James
Lyra (His Dark Materials) Philip Pullman