Steerforth is David's childhood friend and protector, a darkly charismatic man who later seduces "Little Em'ly", the niece of David's housekeeper, Clara Peggotty. Ninteenth-century society cannot forgive her, and Hardy cannot forgive her, and she enacts her own punishment by throwing herself into Shadwater weir. In seeking to escape the confines of her birthplace she brings catastrophe first to the hero, Clym Yeobright, and then to Damon Wildeve, the wayward husband of another woman. Eustacia Vye in The Return of the NativeĮustacia Vye is one of Thomas Hardy's most charismatic heroines – I'll never forget his description of her winter-dark hair, and how when it caught in thorn bushes on the heath, she would retrace her steps and pass against the branches a second time, purely to repeat the sensation. Brother and sister are reconciled, and drown together "in an embrace never to be parted". Eliot writes Maggie into such an impossible corner that death is the only way out. But it's those very complexities that capsize the book in the end. George Eliot's portrayal of the headstrong Maggie Tulliver is so tender, so insightful, so moving, and the complexities of her relationship with her brother and lovers so perceptively described. But the pity and beauty of Shakespeare's poetry can withstand even that Pre-Raphaelite passing-off: "Her clothes spread wide And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up … but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull'd the poor wretch … To muddy death." 2. Perhaps the most famous literary drowning of them all, immortalised in Millais' painting, though the effect is somewhat dampened – if you'll forgive the pun – when you realise poor Lizzie Siddal modelled for it in a cold bath. His first wife, Harriet, was found floating in the Serpentine in 1816, two years after he had left her for Mary Godwin, and images of drowning and shipwreck thread through his work, not least in a strange early poem where he describes a young girl who shrinks, Ophelia-like, from a "yawning watery grave".Īnd it's with Shakespeare's heroine that I'll begin my list.
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