I don’t know when I stopped describing heroines. Somewhere
along the way between my first book and the middle ones I realized readers
usually formed images themselves without my having to describe first-person
narrators in detail. I might say what the colour of their hair was, or their
age if it was relevant, but anything beyond that was more likely just a passing
comment touching on some feature in comparison to someone else.
Celia, the heroine of Season of Storms, looking at her famous
actress mother, admits: “She was
lovely. I had always thought so, always wished my own eyes could have been as
large, my features half as delicate. Instead I’d inherited only her small hands
and her allergy to cats.”
And here’s the exchange between David Fortune, the hero of
The Shadowy Horses, and the heroine Verity Grey, when they first meet:
“I must say,” he confessed, leaning back again, “you’re not
at all as I pictured you.”
Everyone said that. Museum workers, I’d learned, were
supposed to be little old ladies in spectacles, not twenty-nine-year-olds in
short skirts. I nodded patiently. “I’m younger, you mean?”
“No. It’s only that, with Adrian recommending you, I’d have
thought to find someone…well, someone…”
“Tall, blonde, and beautiful?”
“Something like that.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I was, to my knowledge, the only
dark-haired woman who’d ever received so much as a dinner invitation from Adrian
Sutton-Clarke, and I’d held his interest only until the next blonde had come
along.
We later learn her hair is long, and that an eight-year-old
boy thinks she’s a “
stoater”, but that’s it.
In The Winter Sea, I don’t think I described Carrie at all.
And I know in The Firebird the only stray reference to Nicola’s looks was made
at the beginning, when she says she’d got her job partly because “I had the
proper look [to suit the image of the Galerie St-Croix], the proper pedigree,
the right credentials, and I always dressed to fit the part.” And later we
learn what her hair colour is when Rob warns her his father has “aye had a
liking for blondes.”
But that’s it.
So it fascinates me to no end to see readers remark that my
heroines are always beautiful. I won’t quote any particular readers’ reviews
because I don’t like doing that—readers are wholly entitled to have their
opinions, and authors, in my view, should not interfere with that. But the
comments come up with enough regularity to make me wonder why so many people,
when faced with a character who isn’t fully described, seem to want to default
to the “beautiful”.
Even more fascinating to me is that some readers seem to
assume the heroine is beautiful because she manages to attract the romantic
attention of one or more men in the small town she travels to, as if beauty
alone is the thing that attracts men—as if no man could ever be attracted by a
woman’s wit, intelligence, vivacity, or simply the sheer novelty of having her
arrive in town. (I grew up in a small town and I’ve travelled to a lot of them
and lived in a small village in the west of Wales—believe me when I say you do
NOT have to be a beauty to attract attention when you turn up as a stranger in
a local pub :-)
The women I see in my mind when I’m writing are never what I
would call “beautiful”. Pretty, perhaps, in an ordinary everyday way, but it’s
my belief everyone’s pretty to somebody, and the most plain-looking face can
become pretty when we have fallen in love with the person behind it.
I’m curious, though: Why do you think some readers, when faced with a blank face, are
programmed to fill in the features as “beautiful”?
