Classics of literature with strong feminine characters

By EmmaLovesBooks

I’ve been working my way through a bunch of classic books over the last few years—Dumas, Dostoyevsky, Stevenson, Verne, all kinds of stuff in between. The one thing I keep running into is that a lot of the women characters I’ve seen are pretty powerless, super emotional, and either devoted to the main guy in a hopeless way or doing some kind of sneaky thing. I’m reading Frankenstein right now, and it feels like it bucks that trend a bit. Any other classics where the women are written as actually strong / well-developed?