Literary villainesses

[KEV67]

Inspired by Milady from The Three Musketeers, submit your best literary villainesses. Mine are:

 

Milady - The Three Musketeers

Barbara Covett - Notes from a Scandal

Becky Sharp - Vanity Fair

Miss Haversham - Great Expectations 

 

I cannot think of any others right now, but I may update my list.

[poppy]

Two that spring to mind are from Game of Thrones ... Cersai Lannister and Melisandre, both unbelievably evil 😈 

[Madeleine]

Agree about Cersei, not sure about Melisandre.

 

I'd forgotten about Barbara from Notes on a Scandal, great choice, and sadly believable too.

[KEV67]

There were often villainesses in Raymond Chandler books. Often it was the beautiful woman who hired him in the first place. Think white gloves, think cigarette holder. This was not actually very original of Chandler because the her prototype was Brigid O' Shaughnessy in the Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammet, unless he pinched the idea from someone. I am guessing Brigid O' Shaughnessy was of Irish extraction, although that was not germane to the plot.

[lunababymoonchild]

Cruella De Vil comes to mind but she's more a cartoon than anything else. The Wicked Witch of the West, from Wizard of Oz is also somewhat cartoonish/fantasy. There is Lady Macbeth from Shakespeare's Macbeth. My favourite would be The Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen - she stole a child how villainish is that?

[Madeleine]

Yes I agree, for a lot of these characters it's best to go back to the original story.

[France]

On 6/24/2023 at 5:24 PM, KEV67 said:

Inspired by Milady from The Three Musketeers, submit your best literary villainesses. Mine are:

 

Milady - The Three Musketeers

Barbara Covett - Notes from a Scandal

Becky Sharp - Vanity Fair

Miss Haversham - Great Expectations 

 

I cannot think of any others right now, but I may update my list.

I wouldn't describe Becky Sharp as a villaness, more of an absolute survivor, though I grant you she's thoroughly devious and always prepared to backstab but she does have redeeming points.

 

6 hours ago, lunababymoonchild said:

Cruella De Vil comes to mind but she's more a cartoon than anything else.

Have you read 101 Dalmatians? My children loved me reading it to them, it's very funny, and Cruella was a much more rounded figure than in the film - she was expelled from school for drinking ink and all her food tastes of pepper but she was a real villaness, totally focused on what she wanted.

 

I didn't enjoy Gone Girl but the wife, was she called Amy?,  was a thoroughly nasty piece of work.

 

Most stepmothers in fairy tales are cast as villanesses, Goneril and Regan from King Lear might qualify or are they just thoroughly greedy and unpleasant?

[KEV67]

There was Livia, Emperor Augustus's wife, in I Claudius by Robert Graves. She was evil. There were a number of villainesses in those books.

[France]

23 hours ago, KEV67 said:

There was Livia, Emperor Augustus's wife, in I Claudius by Robert Graves. She was evil. There were a number of villainesses in those books.

Messalina being probably the greatest villaness of them all.

[KEV67]

2 hours ago, France said:

Messalina being probably the greatest villaness of them all.

Messalina was a slapper, but I doubt she was as bad as Livia and Agrippina.

[Hayley]

Do we have Circe yet? She has to score pretty highly for all the seducing and turning men into animals. 
 

The head witch from Roald Dahl’s The Witches was also very villainous. 

[KEV67]

I shall have to add Moll Flanders. I started off by sympathising. She often  finds herself in difficult situations, but why is that? She takes a lax view on bigamy. She is never very attached to her children. She steals for the buzz of it. I think she is an out and out sociopath.  I think there's something wrong with her.

[Dellumi]

I’d add Lady Macbeth from "Macbeth" for her ambition and manipulation, and maybe Cersei Lannister from "Game of Thrones" for her fierce determination to protect her family at any cost.