Leading ladies in our favourite novels capture our hearts and imaginations for a multitude reasons. Yet often it is the style of these fictitious females that cements them in our minds long after the final chapter. Running in Heels looks at ten of fiction’s most fashionable heroines

Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote, 1958.

Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s centres around Holly Golightly and her year in New York City as a society girl chasing dollars and diamonds. Arguably the birth of the LBD, Holly Golightly’s ‘slim cool black dress’ and her pearl necklace gave birth to a style and cultural icon, Audrey Hepburn, in the 1961 feature film. And taught us all some useful lessons: ‘you can always tell what kind of a person a man thinks you are by the earrings he gives you.’

Lady Brett Ashley, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926.

‘Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that”

Lady Brett Ashley is the heartbreaker of Hemingway’s first major novel, The Sun Also Rises. Brett embodies the three key trends of the 1920s: bobbed hair, jersey material that was loose fitting, and masculine references in her dressing. The jersey material was made fashionable by Coco Chanel and was a complete rebellion to what had come before. Jersey material was traditionally associated with men’s sportswear and gave women an unprecedented freedom of movement. Furthermore, the mobility, modernity and freedom of Chanel’s designs reflected the changing social and political landscape women like Brett Ashley were in. Lady Brett Ashley was famously modelled on a British woman called Lady Duff Twysden who Hemingway met in Paris in the 1920s. Brett, and Duff’s, style is a significant declaration of independence and an embracing of the avant-garde.

Cecilia Tallis, Atonement, Ian McEwan, 2001.

In McEwan’s novel, lives change forever when Briony, Cecilia’s younger sister makes a terrible mistake. On the night that Cecilia, Briony and many others lives change tragically and irreversibly, Cecilia arrives dressed for dinner in a backless emerald silk dress. The dress takes on a life of its own, becoming a siren for Cecilia’s charged sexuality as well as the possibility for destruction and menace, and a final moment of excess and luxury before the onslaught of the Second World War which was soon to follow. In the 2007 film adaptation Keira Knightly plays Cecilia. The dress produced for the film received much critical acclaim for its faithfulness to the dress in the novel.

Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 1813.

‘I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really almost looked wild’ – Miss Bingley

Allegedly, Jane Austen coined the word ‘stylish’ in Sense and Sensibility, which suggests this was a woman who knew clothes were important. In Pride and Prejudice, the character of Elizabeth Bennet transforms her dress from a period feature to a bold statement of independence and self sufficiency; two things which women were mostly prohibited from in Austen’s world. When her sister Jane becomes ill whilst visiting the Bingleys – the local aristocracy, Elizabeth is called to her side. However, she cannot take a carriage so she must walk. When she arrives at the house, she shocks and outrages her snobbish neighbours as the bottom of her dress and her shoes are completely covered in mud. A wonderful moment of defying convention, Elizabeth’s dirty dress exudes her fearless spirit of character.

Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell, 1997.

In 1994 Candace Bushnell started writing a column for the New York Observer about her and her friends’ lives in New York City. Later, the columns were collated into a book, under the title Sex and the City. In 1998, US television network HBO turned the book into a series for television. The rest, as they say, is history. Manolo’s, over- sized corsages and making your boyfriend ‘swear on the Chanel’ have become a regular part of thousands of womens’ lives thanks to Carrie Bradshaw.

Ophelia, Hamlet, William Shakespeare, 1599-1601 and The lady of Shalott, Lord Tennyson, 1833.

‘Lying, robed in snowy white

That loosely flew to left and right’

Ophelia, the lover of Prince Hamlet and The Lady of Shalott, born of Arthurian legend, both find their fate in water. Ophelia falls from a willow branch into the river, whilst the Lady of Shalott floats to her death in a boat, after bringing a curse upon herself by doing the very thing she was forbidden; looking directly at the world. Both of these tragic females have been magically immortalised through the famous art of John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse respectively. In both paintings the women drift to their fate in a loose white gown. The dress, a symbol of innocence and purity has become an emotive and powerful feature of the artists’ representation of these women.

Gloria Gilbert, The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922

Believed to be based on his relationship with his wife Zelda, Fitzgerald’s second novel tells the story of a once thrilling infatuation which becomes a disastrous and prolonged fall from grace. Parties, fun and young love gets replaced with alcoholism, fighting and affairs. Gloria Gilbert is beautiful and enticing when Anthony meets her, and her 1920s flapper style is explored repeatedly from her ‘small toque’ sitting ‘rakishly on her head, allowing the yellow ripples of her hair wave out in jaunty glory’ to the rumours of her going into ‘Yale swimming pool one night in a chiffon evening dress’ Indeed her style breaks down when their marriage does too, ‘I could think of nothing except how I wanted a grey squirrel coat – and how we can’t afford one.’

Odette, A la Recherché du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust, 1913.

Odette’s style is one of subtle but deadly seduction. When she receives Monsieur Swan in her risqué day coat, the soft shades and sheer fabrics of satin and silk, and ‘her neck and arms bare’ leave him breathless and smitten. On one occasion her ‘mauve crepe de Chine dressing gown’ and ‘allowing her hair, which she had undone, to flow down her cheeks’ reminds Swann of Botticelli’s “The Trials of Moses” (1481-82) from the Sistine Chapel which in turn intensifies his attraction to her and sparks the beginning of a long and passionate affair.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, 1878.

In this twentieth century heavyweight of a novel, the heroine Anna Karenina is described as ‘fashionable’. Famously, at a ball where she first dances with whom will become her lover, Vronsky, Anna Karenina arrives in a stunning black dress

‘Anna was not in lilac, the colour which Kitty was sure she ought to have worn, but in a low necked black velvet gown which displayed her full shoulders and bosom, that seemed carved out of ivory, and her rounded arms with their delicate tiny wrists’

A tragic figure, the black dress becomes a symbol of the sorrow and misery that will cast a shadow on her life from her affair, her rejection from society and her eventual suicide. Yet at that moment, her friend Kitty remarks how the dress illuminates Anna’s beauty;

‘But, seeing her now in black, she felt that she had never realised all her charm. She saw her now in a new and quite unexpected light and realised that Anna could not have worn lilac, and that her charm lay precisely in the fact that she stood out from whatever she was wearing, that her dress was never conspicuous on her…’

Cécile, Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan, 1954.

Originally published in 1954, Bonjour Tristesse was written by Françoise Sagan when she was only 17. The novel tells the story of a young seventeen- year -old girl, Cecile and her relationship with her father and his two lovers on the Riviera. Cecile’s style embodied the shift that was taking place in women’s fashion from the 1950s to the 1960s. Her cropped hair, provocative one-piece swimsuit and her fierce and youthful sexuality was making way for the swinging 60s, all intensified by the summer heat of the Cote d’Azur. What’s more it seems the author, Françoise Sagan, was very much like her heroine when she famously said, ‘A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.’