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Heroine   /hˈɛroʊən/   Listen
Heroine

noun
1.
The main good female character in a work of fiction.
2.
A woman possessing heroic qualities or a woman who has performed heroic deeds.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Heroine" Quotes from Famous Books



... brief conversation they had entered the hotel, and now the lobby idlers took quick cognizance of Mrs. Austin's presence. The lanky, booted Ranger excited no comment, for men of his type were common here; but Alaire was the heroine of many stories and the object of a wide-spread curiosity; therefore she received open stares and heard low whisperings. Naturally resenting this attention, she gave her hand to Law more quickly than she would ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... Constantinople: he affected a passion for her; but it was only Platonic. She, however, beguiled him of his valuable yellow diamond ring. She is the Florence of Childe Harold, and merited the poetical embalmment, or rather the amber immortalisation, she possesses there—being herself a heroine. There was no exaggeration in saying that many incidents of her life would appear improbable in fiction. Her adventures with the Marquis de Salvo form one of the prettiest romances in the Italian language; everything in her destiny ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... with indignation by any one who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion. Licentious as the times are, we trust it will obtain no imitators of the heroine in this country. It may act, however, as a warning to those who fancy themselves at liberty to dispense with the laws of propriety and decency, and who suppose the possession of perverted talents will atone for the well government of society and the ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... measure of her own and her children's feet, and on his return to Buffalo sent her a box containing shoes, stockings, and such other comfortable articles of clothing as they most needed. He published a brief account of his visit to the heroine of Long Point, which attracted the attention of some members of the Provincial Parliament, and through their exertions a grant of one hundred acres of land, on the Canada shore, near Port Rowan, was made to her. Soon after she was invited to Buffalo, where she naturally excited much interest. A generous ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... the Door slammed she Staggered toward the Kitchen, holding on to the Furniture here and there, the same as a Sardou Heroine. In the Kitchen was a Box of Rough on Rats. Hastily Concealing it beneath the loose Folds of her Morning Gown, she went to her Room and looked in ...
— More Fables • George Ade

... lines,—but a series of ideal portraits of the women of Shakspeare's plays. The reader may fancy himself led by an intelligent cicerone who pauses before each picture and with well-chosen words tells enough of the story to present the heroine, and then gives her own conception of the character, with such hints concerning manners and personal peculiarities as a careful study of the play may furnish. The narrations are models of neatness and brevity, yet full enough to give a clear understanding of the situation to any one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... dried with her gathering indignation. It had not occurred to her to blame herself in any way; she felt rather in the position of the ill-used heroine of a ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford

... appear three supernatural females,—the holy mothers Friday, Wednesday, and Sunday,—who assist the hero in his quest of the heroine, and in another Wallachian story they help a wife to find ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... unhappy because you are; the world ought to wear crape, and the light of the sun be darkened. But the world laughs and sings much as usual, the sun shines as joyously. Your father's marriage will be an accomplished fact, and our modern heroine says 'yes' to the first man who asks her to marry him in a fit of spleen, because she will be Grace Danton's step-daughter, and must retire a little into the background, and look forward to the common humdrum ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... scene of this domestic tragedy is laid at the Bell Inn, in Wood-street, and the heroine may possibly be daughter to the poor old clergyman who is reading the direction of a letter close to the York waggon, from which vehicle she has just alighted. In attire—neat, plain, unadorned; in demeanor—artless, modest, diffident: in the bloom of youth, and more distinguished by native ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... no means of a commonplace character, and the heroine will certainly win the reader's admiration, so that the book is likely to prove ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... overhear the story. To his mind Corinna had not much of a talent for it. He thought he could have told a better one himself. It was the chronicle of an unpleasantly good little girl, and when Corinna was gravelled for matter to continue with, she filled in by lengthily describing the heroine's clothes. "Just filibustering like the U. S. Senate," thought ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner

... past; they had that wider world of unreality in which to circulate; they had the Scudery language at the tips of their tongues, the fantastic sentimentalism of that marvellous old maid who invented the seventeenth-century hero and heroine; or who crystallised the vanishing figures of that brilliant age and made them immortal. All that little language of toyshop platonics had become a natural form of speech with these two, bred and educated in the Marais, while it was still the select and aristocratic ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... doubting affection, she had yielded to an ignoble, unworthy coercion; but it had been put on too hard of late, and her natural character asserted itself under the pressure. She was in that mood which makes the martyr and the heroine, sometimes even the criminal, but on which, deaf to reason and insensible to fear, threats and arguments ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... to go down, he sat in his room, this terrible question confronting him. No, he knew nothing about women! He had left his heroine very much alone in "Reuben Hallard" and those occasions when he had been obliged to bring her on the stage had not been too successful. He knew nothing ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... English pirate whose depredations on the high seas were so ferocious that he was called The Wasp because of the keenness of his sting. Glutted with looting, he enlists in the navy and gives up his life defending his country's flag. A love story with the winsome Kitty Trimmer for its heroine lends a fascinating charm to the narrative. 12mo. Cloth. Illustrated. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine

... Chicago life, a task which I found rather difficult. After nine years of life in Boston, the city by the lake seemed depressingly drab and bleak, and my only hope lay in representing it not as I saw it, but as it appeared to my Wisconsin heroine who came to it from Madison and who perceived in it the mystery and the beauty which I had lost. To Rose, fresh from the farm, it was a great capital, and the lake a majestic sea. As in A Spoil of Office, I had tried to maintain the point of view of a countryman, so now I attempted ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... disappointment. Of course I knew it was just an idyll of youth, a day long, and that the book was closed forty years before. But I could not bear to have it closed with a bang. Somewhere in the narrative had come to me the impression that the heroine of it had died young in those exciting war-times of long ago. I had a picture in my mind of the dancing eyes closed meekly in a last sleep; of the young officer's hand laid sorrowing on the bright halo ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... of the especially well-informed dramatic critics who, of course, had seen the original piece Miss Helyett in Paris, asked why the English adapter had taken the trouble to invent nine sisters for the heroine; the nine sisters never being seen and having nothing whatever to do with the plot. Here the well-informed ones were to a certain extent wrong. In the original French piece, Miss Helyett,—whose name, as is suggested by ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various

... given to the child in whose veins the blood of English noblemen was flowing; and when the ceremony was ended Hagar bore back to her room Hester Hamilton, the child defrauded of her birthright, and Maggie Miller, the heroine of our story. ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... beauty of her conversion at the finish arose from the working of a miracle, a stroke of heavenly grace which endowed her with something divine. This was not the opinion of Silviane, who from the first lines regarded Pauline as the ideal heroine of some symbolical legend. However, as the critic talked on and on, she had to feign approval; and he was delighted at finding her so beautiful and docile beneath his ferule. At last, as ten o'clock was striking, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... that I was visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately became "The Old Wives' Tale." Of course I felt that the woman who caused the ignoble mirth in the restaurant would not serve me as a type of heroine. For she was much too old and obviously unsympathetic. It is an absolute rule that the principal character of a novel must not be unsympathetic, and the whole modern tendency of realistic fiction is against oddness in a prominent figure. I knew that I must choose ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... attention to the fact that it is Juliet "who proposes and urges on the sudden marriage." Romeo has only spoken of love; it is she who asks him, if his purpose be marriage, to send her word next day. In Troilus and Cressida (III., 2), the heroine exclaims: ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... Violetta the consumptive heroine of "La Traviata." Charmingly sung and admirably, nay, most touchingly, acted. MAUREL excellent as Germont Senior, and MONTARIOL quite the weak-minded masher Alfredo. What a different turn the story might have taken had it occurred ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various

... war of extermination, sparing neither women nor children, in the region in which she lived. Invention and fable have kindly come to the aid of the most famous of the world's heroines, but neither fable nor invention has touched the character or the deeds of this heroine of the Revolution. She stands out on the pages of history rough, uncouth, hot-tempered, unmanageable, uneducated, impolite, ugly, and sharp-tongued; but, as her friends said of her, "What a honey of a patriot she was!" She loved ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris

... to the kitchen, as usual, that day, for another of Lisetta's stories. The Italian, with her glibness of tongue and ready fund of anecdote, was transformed in her imaginative mind into a veritable improvisatore. Talila was not by any means the only heroine of the little tales. Mae had made the acquaintance of many youths and maidens, and to-day Lisetta, after thinking over her list of important personages, chose the Madre Ilkana as the heroine of the occasion. ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason

... romances about her. That is she in faultless gray, with the neat leather bag in her lap, and a bouquet of the first autumnal blooms perched in her shapely hands which are prettily yet substantially gloved in some sort of gauntlets. She can be easy and dignified, my dear middle-aged heroine, even in one of our horse-cars, where people are for the most part packed like cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or fatigue from the thirty or forty miles which I choose to fancy she has ridden from the handsome elm-shaded ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... with a large family and amiable neighbors, and their doings are amusing, but her fancies and devices are captivating.... The little heroine is all ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... notion that you have written too much under the influence of feelings similar to those of a poet or novelist, who deepens the distress in the earlier part of his work, in order that the happy catastrophe which he has prepared for his hero and heroine may be more keenly relished. Your object is to conduct us to Elysium, and, lest we should not be able to enjoy that pure air and purpurial sunshine, you have taken a peep at Tartarus on the road. Now I am of your mind, that we ought not to make peace with ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... Tavern, at the ford of the Merced, where so many fatal fights are had. Thence I went to Mariposa County, and Colonel Fremont's mines, and made an interesting visit to "the Colonel," as he is called all over the country, and Mrs. Fremont, a heroine equal to either fortune, the salons of Paris and the drawing-rooms of New York and Washington, or the roughest life of the remote and wild mining regions of Mariposa,—with their fine family of spirited, clever children. After a rest there, we went ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... life in the middle West which deals principally with the fortunes of a family whose members are the social and financial leaders of their section. The heroine is a girl whose education is broad enough to enable her to assist her father in managing a railroad. The hero is a Methodist minister of liberal tendencies. The story is told with remarkable fidelity ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... of novels and poems. Browning was much in her mind. She saw herself as the heroine of psychological drama. How interesting! How thrilling! During her life at Northampton, she had dreamed of such things, with no expectation of their ever befalling her. Truly, she was fortune's favourite. Destiny had raised ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... the eagle poised above the naked rocks form a picture that no one could willingly forget. And the people, from the kindly towns-folk to the quaint and touching peasant types, are as real as any representation of human nature need be. Every goat even, has its personality. As for the little heroine, she is a blessing not only to everyone in the story, but to everyone who reads it. The narrative merits of the book are too apparent to ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri

... Miss!" said the gate-keeper, as our heroine left the yard, and then laughed as though he had committed a pun that would immortalize him from that ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams

... provided here. So, too, it does not require strict character-drawing—a gift with which Scott was indeed amply provided, but which he did not exhibit, and had no call to exhibit, here. If the personages will play their parts, that is enough. And they all play them very well here, though the hero and heroine do certainly exhibit something of that curious nullity which has been objected to the heroes nearly always, the heroines too frequently, of the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury

... people had done their wicked deeds there were often unfortunate children, dispossessed or forgotten in some attic of the castle. One of these is the heroine of this story. She had never been told who or where her mother was. By a series of coincidences she comes across the name of a person who may know the answers to these questions. I will not spoil the story for you by ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt

... word or deed is he a convincingly real villain. His friend and foil, the noble young Count de Melvil, is no more alive than he; and equally wooden are Joshua, the high-minded, saint-like Jew, and that tedious, foolish Don Diego. Neither is the heroine alive, the peerless Monimia, but then, in her case, want of vitality is not surprising; the presence of it would amaze us. If she were a woman throbbing with life, she would be different from Smollett's other heroines. The "second lady" ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... seats, on which warriors spend long hours in drinking; to pits full of serpents into which the vanquished are thrown; in the midst of dismal landscapes where gibbeted corpses swing in the wind; to mysterious islands where whirlwinds of flame shoot from the tombs, and where the heroine arrives on her ships, her "ocean steeds," to evoke the paternal shade, behold once more the beloved being in the midst of infernal fires, and receive from his hands the enchanted and avenging sword. Armed Valkyrias cross the sky; ravens comment on the actions of men; the tone is ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... while Sadie eyed her almost awed. Eighteen and with this behind her! The more she knew of the youngest Miss Alston the more her respect and admiration increased. She waited expectantly for the heroine to resume, which she did after a last, luxurious inhalation of the ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person. If the plain, substantial style of King Victor and King Charles is proper to a play with such a hero as Charles and such a heroine as Polyxena, the coloured style, rich in imagery, is no less right in The Return of the Druses, where religious and chivalric enthusiasm are blended with the enthusiasm of the passion of love. But already Browning was ceasing to bear in mind the conditions of the stage. Certain pages ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... and how our little hero and heroine went off into the world one night in search of happiness: that is the subject of ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc

... the keys to Isabel, who would have addressed some soothing flatteries to Boabdil, but the emotion and excitement were too much for her compassionate heart, heroine and queen though she was; and when she lifted her eyes upon the calm and pale features of the fallen monarch, the tears gushed from them irresistibly, and her voice died in murmurs. A faint flush overspread the features of Boabdil, and there was a momentary ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... strange to those of our readers, who do not call to mind the existence of the ancient amazons; the dashing white sergeant being the only female soldier known in modern times. Nor have we more than one authenticated instance of a female sailor, if we except the heroine commemorated in the somewhat apocryphal narrative— ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh

... is Cora Kimball," said our heroine, "and I have a camp at the lower end of the lake. It is ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose

... power may well have extended northwards as far as the nearest of the Scandinavian nations; and this mention of Medes and Danes as his subjects would serve at once to indicate the vast extent of his dominion." [In the "Niebelungen-Lied," the old poet who describes the reception of the heroine Chrimhild by Attila (Etsel) says that Attila's dominions were so vast, that among his subject-warriors there were Russian, Greek, Wallachian, Polish, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... artistic temperament, its demands, its limitations and its characteristics. There is a playwright in "Rose and Ninette;" there is a painter in the "Immortal;" there is an actor in "Fromont and Risler;" there are a sculptor, a poet, and a novelist on the roll of the heroine's lovers in "Sapho." Daudet handles them gently always, unless they happen to belong to the theatre. Toward the stage-folk he is pitiless; for all other artists he has abundant appreciation; he is not blind to their little weaknesses, but these he can forgive even though he refuses ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... rather breathlessly ascended the steps to the entrance of Three Towers with the other girls she studied this slim, straight woman who had been the heroine of so many of ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler

... that Bows on his part spoke, and told his version of the story, whereof Arthur and little Fan were the hero and heroine; how they had met by no contrivance of the former, but by a blunder of the old Irishman, now in bed with a broken shin—how Pen had acted with manliness and self-control in the business—how Mrs. Bolton was an idiot; and ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... The heroine, Hildegarde, finds herself transplanted from the middle western farm to the gay social whirl of the East. She is almost swept off her feet, but in the end ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott

... an extremely easy, simple and prosaic way to attain many an end, which has always been supposed to require stupendous efforts. In an Italian fairy tale a prince besieges a castle with an army—trumpets blowing, banners waving, and all the pomp and circumstances of war—to obtain a beautiful heroine who is meanwhile carried away by a rival who knew of a subterranean passage. Hitherto, as I have already said, men have sought for self-control only by means of heroic exertion, or by besieging the castle from without; ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... pepper-and-salt one. I didn't mind it in the least, but what worried me was the libretto which I tried to glance through before the curtain rose. In vain. The story would not come clear, although I saw I was in trouble when I read that the hero and heroine were brother and sister. Experience has taught me that family rows are the worst, and I wondered why Wagner chose such a dull, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... overcome with amazement when he learned what Patty had done, and took off his cap to her, with the air of one offering homage to a brave heroine. ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells

... extinguished but in her blood. When I wrote my letter in answer to M. de Menonville, in the beginning of January, 1791, I had good reason for thinking that this description of revolutionists did not so early nor so steadily point their murderous designs at the martyr king as at the royal heroine. It was accident, and the momentary depression of that part of the faction, that gave to the husband ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... a good deal about Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. This arose out of my saying I had been reading 'Glenarvon,' in which Lady Caroline gives Byron's letters to herself as Glenarvon's letters to the heroine. Lady Morgan had been the confidante of Lady Caroline, had seen many of Byron's letters, and possessed many of her friend's - full of details of the extraordinary intercourse which ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... 1904 Mayhap, Ella, here too distance lends its enchantment, and these gallant brethren would have quarrelled over Rosamund, or even had their long swords at each other's throat. Mayhap that Princess and heroine might have failed in the hour of her trial and never earned her saintly crown. Mayhap the good horse "Smoke" would have fallen on the Narrow Way, leaving false Lozelle a victor, and Masouda, the royal-hearted, would have offered up a strangely different sacrifice upon the ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... boys ideas when they had time to realize all it means. Do you know I am rather sorry for her myself. I shouldn't be surprised if she were rather a dear little thing. She looks tender and cuddle-some. Perhaps she is like the heroine of a sentimental novel I read the other day. Her chief slave said of her 'She walks into a man's heart through his eyes and sits down there and makes a warm place which will never get cold again.' Rather ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted into a public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the other hand it shares with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of having a young and appealing woman for its chief figure. The sentimentalists thus have a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole; Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is, at bottom, a tale of love—the one theme of permanent interest to the average American novel-reader, the chief stuffing ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... heroine of a good, wholesome story that will appeal to every mother as the sort of book she would like her daughter to read. In the homy McBirneys of Mt. Tennyson, down in the Blue Ridge country, and their hearty mountain neighbors, girl readers will find new friends ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... was circumspection itself, took her time. "She's dreadful, but she's not big." She added that she wasn't sure she ought to let Adela go in alone; but this young lady took herself throughout for a heroine, and it wasn't in a heroine to shrink from any encounter. Wasn't she every instant in transcendent contact with her mother? The visitor might have no connexion whatever with the drama of her father's ...
— The Marriages • Henry James

... the Liberal party he was nicknamed the "Brave Cerizet." When Petit-Claud's successor compelled him to sell his business in Angouleme, he found a fresh career on the provincial stage, where his talents as an actor were like to be turned to brilliant account. The chief stage heroine, however, obliged him to go to Paris to find a cure for love among the resources of science, and there he tried to curry favor ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac

... his experiments upon the infant peasant mind, of things in general, he could and did go away for rest. The countess did not. Decidedly, the Countess Sophia Tolstoy is one of those truly feminine heroines who are cast into shadow by a brilliant light close to them, but a heroine none the less in more ways than need be mentioned. Her self-denial and courage gave to the world "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenin;" and she declares that were it to do over again she would not hesitate a moment. The public owes the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... reason which makes it inapplicable to the particular case. No reflection, no picture, where living drama is possible—it is a good rule; do not let the hero come between us and his active mind, do not let the heroine stand in front of her emotions and portray them—unless for cause, for some needful effect that would otherwise be missed. I see the reason and the effect very plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example, where the point ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... depressed, and gloomy, and our friends are sorry for us and think something dreadful must have happened to make us so unhappy, all that we need in reality is sleep, fresh air, exercise, and play. It is not being a heroine to be sad. Most real heroines are happy people. There is nothing heroic in making other people depressed by our gloomy faces. The ideal girl is healthy and happy, she sleeps eight hours or more at night, and plays a reasonable part of her time. To play all the time ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy

... dearest thing!" said Audrey. "You've no idea. You'd love her. And she's done as much for Women's Suffrage as anybody in the world. She's a real heroine, if you like. You couldn't help the cause better than by helping her. And I know how keen you are to help." And Audrey said to herself: "He's as timid as a girl about it. How queer men ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... bloomed wonderfully. She sprang at once from childhood to young womanhood, and Mrs. Smith was pleased to have her protegee appear so well and receive so much attention, for she felt that she had had the revision of her. She already saw in her the heroine of the novel she meant to write, with the plot beginning in Kilo and Clarence, and carried to ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler

... prairie girl. I always associate it with you. Well, again and again on this trip we would pass through prairie villages—bleak and lonely—with all the people in from miles about to see me. Among them were often dozens of young girls, often pretty, and as far as I could see much more happy than the heroine of the story. One of them shook hands with me, and then, after much whispering, said: "We want to shake hands with the guard!" The "guard" proved to be Roly, who was very swell in his uniform, and whom they evidently thought much more attractive than ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt

... the fire, reflecting on Becky for some time after Mariette left her. She made up a story of which Becky was the ill-used heroine. She thought she looked as if she had never had quite enough to eat. Her very eyes were hungry. She hoped she should see her again, but though she caught sight of her carrying things up or down stairs on several occasions, she always ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... disappointed. "After that dinner I thought it only fair to read it, and although I detect considerable crude power in it, still I am very sorry it was ever published. The presentation of Judaism is most ignorant. All the mystical yearnings of the heroine might have found as much satisfaction in the faith of her own race as they find expression ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... soldier she saved and eventually married, or whether she came accidentally upon the accident and their intimacy began that night, we shall probably never know. But we can know, I fancy, that this Hedwig was a heroine, and deserved to marry a man who became something of a hero. She did the bold and the wise thing. She persuaded the sentry to go back to his post, in which place there was nothing to connect him with the disaster; he was but one of the most loyal and orderly of fifty such ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... came to the garden and peep'd in, exclaimed he "Well do I know her, in truth; for when I told you the story Of that noble deed which was done by the maiden I spoke of, How she seized on the sword, and defended herself, and the servants, She the heroine was! You can see how active her nature. But she's as good as she's strong; for her aged kinsman she tended Until the time of his death, for he died overwhelm'd by affliction At the distress of his town, and the danger his goods were exposed to. Also with mute resignation ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... blue-gray eyes of a girl across the aisle. Thurston considered himself immune from blue-gray—or any other-eyes, so that he permitted himself to regard her calmly and judicially, his mind reverting to the fact that he would need a heroine to be kidnapped, and wondering if she would do. She was a Western girl, he could tell that by the tan and by her various little departures from the Eastern styles—such as doing her hair low rather than high. Where he ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower

... has recently disbanded. We tried other things, but we had been spoiled. Our Kipling winter was a failure. We read a play or two, with Sperry's wife reading the heroine, and the rest of us taking other parts. She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry. But it was all stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair. With Herbert on a lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the winter, we have ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... famous Chinese poem, by Hak-rak-ten. The heroine of the poem was Yo-ki-hi, to whom we have made reference before. The story is, that after death she became a fairy, and the Emperor sent a magician to find her. The works of the poet Peh-lo-tien, as it is pronounced by modern Chinese, were the only poems in vogue at that time. Hence, perhaps, the ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various

... heroine of one of the best, if not the best, of Hindoo plays, and the best known in Sanscrit dramatic literature. It was first brought to notice by Sir William Jones, and has been well and poetically translated by Dr. Monier Williams under the title of ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana

... "Rebecca", which seemed practically to demand one. There was never a sequel written, but "The New Chronicles of Rebecca" was published in 1907, and contained some further chapters in the life of its heroine. I had to be satisfied with that, for the time being. Then, well over a year after jotting down Mrs. Wiggin's name on my list of authors to "purchase on sight", I finally ran across a copy of "The Village Watch-Tower"; and it was not even a ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Ovid's writing a letter from Dido to AEneas, in the following words: "Ovid," says he, speaking of Virgil's fiction of Dido and AEneas, "takes it up after him, even in the same age, and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido; dictates a letter for her just before her death to the ungrateful fugitive, and, very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much superior in force to him on the same subject. I think I may be judge of this, because I have translated ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison

... she laughed. "Isn't it bad enough to be prayed for? Must I get into the papers, too, as heroine ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... in 1703. In 1705, Clayton's Arsinoe, adapted and translated from the Italian, was produced at Drury Lane. Buononcini's Camilla was given at the house in the Haymarket, and sung in two languages, the heroine's part being in English and the hero's in Italian. Thomas Clayton, a second-rate musician, but a man with literary tastes, who had been introducer of the opera to London, argued that the words of an opera should be ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... but on the voyage was taken prisoner by an English ship, and conveyed to England, where until 1824 he remained confined in various places, but chiefly in the Tower of London. He was then ransomed and, after his marriage to Lady Jane or Joan Beaufort, dau. of the Duke of Somerset, and the heroine of The King's Quhair (or Book), crowned at Scone. While in England he had been carefully ed., and on his return to his native country endeavoured to reduce its turbulent nobility to due subjection, and to introduce various reforms. His efforts, however, which do not appear ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... new novel has for its heroine a most piquant and delightful American girl, who, at the age of sixteen, falls in love with a Russian prince. He is a man of lofty character with a serious purpose in life and devotes his energies to political journalism. The course of true love runs anything but smoothly. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... the kind. The play was conceived before the Independent Theatre had come into existence. The end was foreseen from the beginning; the tragedy being implicit in the subject. The tragic motive lay deeper than the death of the heroine, who might have been allowed to live, if that last symbolic pageantry had not had its dramatic fitness. Given the characters and the circumstances, the end is ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter

... influence; she harmonized and regulated it with excellent skill; and, in the midst of relentless austerities, she was loved as a mother by her pupils and dependants. Catholic writers extol her as a saint. [ 1 ] Protestants may see in her a Christian heroine, admirable, with all ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... to then-great Gloriana, had in these young men, all either secretly or openly reconciled to Rome, found its object in that rival in whom Edmund Spenser only beheld his false Duessa or snowy Florimel. And, indeed, romance had in her a congenial heroine, who needed little self-blinding so to appear. Her beauty needed no illusion to be credited. Even at her age, now over forty, the glimpse they had had in the fitful torchlight of the cavern had been ravishing, and had confirmed ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... female strength, courage, wisdom? Some authors, who shall be nameless, are, I know, accused of depicting the most feeble, brainless, namby-pamby heroines, for ever whimpering tears and prattling commonplaces. YOU would have the heroine of your novel so beautiful that she should charm the captain (or hero, whoever he may be) with her appearance; surprise and confound the bishop with her learning; outride the squire and get the brush, and, when he fell from his horse, whip out a ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sung by wandering minstrels under the shade of the mango grove; trolled by travelers jogging in bullock carts along empty moonlit roads. Sita's devotion is a household word to many a woman-child of India. Little Lakshmi follows the adventures of the loved heroine as she shares Rama's unselfish renunciation of the throne and exile to the forest with its alarms of wild beasts and wild men. She thrills with fear at Sita's abduction by the hideous giant, Ravana, and the wild journey ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren

... a common, where the county fox-hounds (then bunted by that staunch old sportsman, Mr. Hardhead, of Dumplingbeare) happened to meet. Mr. Smirke, on Pen's mare, Rebecca (she was named after Pen's favourite heroine, the daughter of Isaac of York), astounded the hounds as much as he disgusted the huntsman, laming one of the former by persisting in riding amongst the pack, and receiving a speech from the latter, more remarkable for energy of language, than any oration he had ever heard ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... she not escaping from that magical servitude? Before this question has been under discussion for a minute comes a name—for a time I was really quite unable to decide whether it is the name of the villain in the piece or of the maligned heroine, or a secret society or a gold mine, or a pestilence or a delusion—the name of the ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... turned out to be a privateer. But when the vessel fell in with some of Lord Howe's vessels in the Channel, she refused to fight against her countrymen, "notwithstanding all the blows and menaces the French captain could use." The privateer was taken, and our heroine was carried before Lord Howe, to whom she told candidly all that had happened to her—keeping ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... Rachel in hers. This is Rose Cheny, whom we saw in her ninety-eighth personation of Clarissa Harlowe, and afterward in Genevieve and the Protege sans le Savoir,—a little piece written expressly for her by Scribe. The "Miss Clarisse" of the French drama is a feeble and partial reproduction of the heroine of Richardson; indeed, the original in all its force of intellect and character would have been too much for the charming Rose Cheny, but to the purity and lovely tenderness of Clarissa she does full justice. In the other characters she was the true French girl, full of grace ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... the mere romancist's transparent shift—and he is fortunate in always having one at command, though transparency should, of course, be avoided. The dream-expedient vies in puerility with the hero's rescue of the heroine from deadly peril—a thing that has actually happened about twice since the happily-named, and no less happily extinct, Helladotherium disported itself on the future site of Eden. I am no romancist. I repudiate shifts, and stand or fall by ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... was a little girl, and so kindly brought me back to you, mother. I remember the circumstance, though I have but a dim recollection of him, except that he was very good-natured and laughed, and told me I was a little heroine, though at the time I confess I did not know what he meant. I only remember that I was dreadfully frightened, and very grateful to him for ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston

... decided for the moral side of the question all the more easily that nothing insured me success, if I chose the second alternative. The moment I placed her under the obligation to defend herself Lucie would become a heroine, and the door of my room being open, I might have been exposed to shame and to a very useless repentance. This rather frightened me. Yet, to put an end to my torture, I did not know what to decide. I could ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... concerns their Interest. The present Paper shall be employed in the Service of a very fine young Woman; and the Admonitions I give her, may not be unuseful to the rest of the Sex. Gloriana shall be the Name of the Heroine in To-day's Entertainment; and when I have told you that she is rich, witty, young and beautiful, you will believe she does not want Admirers. She has had since she came to Town about twenty five of those Lovers, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... "do you remember how absorbed, so that it was a very part of her being, the heroine of that story became in the problem of reviving the splendid mummy? She forgot everything in that, and could not think of marriage until the test was made and its sequel satisfactory. She was not faithless; she was simply helpless under an irresistible ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... am gradually verging toward the adventure. The heroine of the romance has not yet made her appearance, but depend upon it she is getting ready. You should never hurry the female characters; besides, it is not proper, even if this were all fiction instead of sober truth, that the heroine should be brought upon the stage just as the hero ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... "Kitty is a true heroine—warm-hearted, self-sacrificing, and, as all good women nowadays are, largely touched with the enthusiasm of humanity. One of the most attractive gift books ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger

... a season or two ago gave us a "thrillin' hair-bre'dth 'scape," wherein an automobile plunged precipitately— with an all too-true realism, the first night—down a lath and canvas ravine, finally saving the heroine from the double-dyed villain who followed so ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... love with Mr. W.J. LOCKE'S incurable romanticism or who have a taste for heroines that "stiffen in a sudden stroke of passion looking for the instant electrically beautiful," let me commend The Red Planet (LANE). As a matter of fact Betty, the heroine, is quite a dear, and the narrator, Major Meredyth, a maimed hero of the Boer War, who looks at this one from the tragic angle of an invalid chair, is, apart from a habit of petulant and not very profound grousing at Governments in The Daily Rail ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various

... laugh at her; my unfriendly critic shall sneer at her. As a heroine of a novel she deserves it; but I hope for their own sakes neither will undervalue the original in their passage through life. These average women are not the spice of fiction, but they are ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... for the rhyme and rhythm of poetry. From her earliest childhood words had always been to her what dolls and toys are to other children, and now at twelve she amused herself with phrases and sentences and images as her schoolmates played with the pieces of their dissected puzzles. If the heroine of a story took a "cursory glance" about her "apartment," Rebecca would shortly ask her Aunt Jane to take a "cursory glance" at her oversewing or hemming; if the villain "aided and abetted" someone in committing a crime, she would before long request the pleasure ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... gaiety was assumed, as a quality essentially necessary to her trade, of which it was one of the miseries, that the professors were obliged frequently to cover an aching heart with a compelled smile. This seemed to be the case with Louise, who, whether she was actually the heroine of her own song, or whatever other cause she might have for sadness, showed at times a strain of deep melancholy thought, which interfered with and controlled the natural flow of lively spirits which the practice of the joyous science ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... effect as by the fact that the erudite and diligent Grimm brothers, the friends of Brentano, did not include the Lorelei-legend in their collection of 579 Deutsche Sagen, 1816. The name of his heroine Brentano took from the famous echo-rock near St. Goar, with which locality he became thoroughly familiar during the years 1780-89. No romanticist knew the Rhine better or loved it more than Brentano. "Lore" ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield

... differing herein from the countries our friend William Archer holds up as examples of seriousness to our childish theatres. There the Juliets and Isoldes, the Romeos and Tristans, might be our mothers and fathers. Not so the English actress. The heroine she impersonates is not allowed to discuss the elemental relations of men and women: all her romantic twaddle about novelet-made love, all her purely legal dilemmas as to whether she was married or "betrayed," quite miss our hearts and worry our minds. To console ourselves we must just look at her. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... adventure from first to last. I tried to think calmly upon it; I tried to get it out of my thoughts, and return seriously to my duties. A vain attempt! The more I reflected upon the incident, the more I became conscious of the powerful interest its heroine had excited within me. Interest, indeed! Say rather passion—a passion that in one single hour had grown as ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... it when it's farther along? About the heroine and how she likes being in a love-story? Mercy gracious, ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White

... their skipper in detecting what was going forward; and it is not very surprising that, with their love of romance, they should forthwith regard the handsome young mate and his pupil as the hero and heroine of an interesting little drama. This view of the affair afforded the men for'ard intense gratification. Ned was exceedingly popular with them; and the tars regarded the conquest with which they so promptly credited him almost as a compliment to themselves, and a triumph to which ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... Grace's face. "How ridiculous," she murmured. "You are the real heroine of that adventure. Have you decided on your ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower

... daughter, Margaret, was my mother, about whom I cannot trust myself to speak at length. She inherited from her mother the dignity, refinement, and air of the cultivated lady. Perhaps some day I may be able to tell the world something of this heroine, but I doubt it. I feel her to be sacred to myself and not for others to know. None could ever really know her—I alone did that. After my father's early death she was all my own. The dedication of my first book[4] tells the story. It was: "To my favorite ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... Mary Grant's sorrowful story, and she recounted it in so simple and unaffected a manner, that it was evident she never thought her conduct had been that of a heroine through those long trying years. But Lady Helena thought it for her, and more than once she put her arms round both the children, and could not restrain ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... heroine was Orlie Wilde: And thus it was I came to hear Her voice's music in my ear— Ay, thus it was Fate paved the way That I walk ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... no great thing to do on my part; and, as I have told the count, the little act of kindness was vastly more than repaid, for your daughter assuredly saved my life from the peasants, as I saved hers from the cold. Your little daughter is quite a heroine," he said more lightly. "I can assure you that even when the bullets were flying about thickly she evinced no signs of fear, and the way in which she stood before me facing those enraged peasants ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty

... what befell behind that scone, Let none who knows reveal. In ballad days she might have been A heroine rousing steel. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... surpassing musician, any more than I believe you to be the tallest woman in the whole world—like the giantess whose picture we saw as we rode through the fair yesterday. But if I don't set you up as a heroine, neither do I offer you your very humble servant as a hero. But I think you are—well, there, I think you are very ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... below. He could not get back till dinner was half over, and came in alarmed and apologetic; but he had nothing worse to encounter than Griff's unmerciful banter (or, as you would call it, chaff) about his knight errantry, and Emily's lovely heroine in the ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge



Words linked to "Heroine" :   role, part, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, Mary McCauley, McCauley, Judith, Molly Pitcher, theatrical role, character, woman, adult female, persona



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