Howard Jacobson's 5 favorite literary heroines

Howard Jacobson's novels include The Finkler Question, which last year won Britain's Man Booker Prize.

One of his five favorite literary heroines, as told to The Week magazine:

Persuasion by Jane Austen

I suffer from heroine addiction. The novels that moved me most as a young man were always about women in whom the desire to be treated justly, to be acknowledged, and to find fulfillment in love burns like a fire, and they remain my favorites to this day. Jane Austen possesses the power to make you feel as you read that nothing else matters in the world but the happiness of her heroines. Anne Elliot's happiness hangs by a thread in Persuasion, and the reader knows no peace until it is secured.

Read about another book on the list.

Persuasion is among Jacobson's top ten novels of sexual jealousy, Elizabeth Buchan's top ten books guaranteed to give comfort during the ending of a relationship, and appears on John Mullan's list of ten of the best concerts in literature.

The Page 99 Test: Persuasion.

Also see Howard Jacobson's list of the five best novels on failure.

--Marshal Zeringue