This feminist study is an innovative reassessment of Brian Moore's five novels featuring
eponymous heroines. The author reviews previous interpretations exposing their sexist bias.
Highlighting Moore's empathetic insights she also discusses the novelist's limitations. She
compares Moore's heroines to Flaubert's Emma Bovary reinterpreted by Mieke Bal Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina revisioned by Aritha van Herk and to female characters created by Canadian women
writers. Rejecting biocriticism the study focuses on Moore's biblical Victorian and modernist
inspirations and his indebtedness to film. Ideas of female thinkers illuminate the condition
of Moore's female protagonists.
