Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist heroine sans pareil, didn't approve of heroines. Great Women - or 'icons', as Elaine Showalter prefers to call the three centuries' worth of feminist 'rule-breakers and path-blazers' celebrated in her new book - get short shrift in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:

I shall not lay any stress on the example of a few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution . . . Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Mme d'Eon etc. These, and many more may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes as well as heroines, exceptional to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures.

LRB 3 January 2002 | PDF Download