The five female literary characters I would invite for tea 🫖

IWD - Daisy Chain Flower Crown

Mar 08, 2024

To celebrate International Women’s Day 2024, I am taking part in

’s invitation to make a Daisy Flower Crown. Gently, Claire prompts us to make virtual flower crowns with careless abandon like we did with real flowers as children. A symbol of pride worn for women everywhere.

The prompt I’m writing about today is: “If you could sit in circle with 5 other women…here today or gone now who would they be and why?”

In homage to World Book Day yesterday and my love for the written word, I want to write about the five characters from literature I would invite to tea.

1. Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables

I have loved L.M. Montgomery’s fictitious redhead character since I was a child. Orphaned and mistreated, this wild-hearted girl with a big imagination and a bigger heart transforms the lives of everyone she meets. She wears rose-tinted spectacles, finds beauty everywhere she looks, and romanticises even the smallest of mundane things.

I’d invite her to tea to: hear her romantical descriptions about how I’d arranged the table.

2. Bathsheba Everdene from Far from the Madding Crowd

Independent, fierce, and wildly capable, Bathsheba is a female farmer in a male-dominated industry. She works like a pack horse and gets alongside her workers in a time when women were mere accessories, and their only hope was to marry well. Of course, she is temporarily seduced and mistreated, but her sense of duty to her farm never wavers. In the end, she is rightfully rewarded with a man who is her equal in every sense of the world.

I’d invite her to tea to talk about down-to-earth, sensible stuff like farmer’s rights and the price of grain.

3. Jane Eyre

Her interior monologues are amongst my favourites in all of literature. In the face of oppression and invisibility, she understands her own worth. Her spirit cannot be dampened despite the injustice she suffers. Jane speaks freely and from the heart, claiming her equality with Mr Rochester. The two speak soul-to-soul in a way that transcends all of her earthly limits. Jane is self-aware and loyal, always determined to do the right thing, even if it means breaking her own heart.

I’d invite her to tea to: skip the small talk and get straight into the deep stuff.

4. Celie from The Colour Purple

Despite being beaten and raped by her father and married off to a cruel man, Celie has an unwavering spirit that nobody can take from her. Being born a black woman in rural Georgia in the 1900s, Celie is perceived as a nobody. A nothing. But she speaks to God every night to make sense of the world. She detaches her spirit from her body, rendering herself untouchable at the hands of cruel men. Through creativity, self-acceptance, faith and, most importantly – female friendship – Celie is able to carve out her place in the world.

I’d invite her to tea to: hear about how we can use our inner lives to rise above everything.

5. Marvellous Ways from A Year of Marvellous Ways

A magical-realism novel by Sarah Winman, Marvellous is an 80-year-old woman who lives by the sea in Cornwall and spends her days looking out through a telescope. Half mermaid, half hermit wild-woman, Marvellous catches crabs, swims naked every day in all weathers and shares her stories. As she nears the end of her life, she imparts all her wisdom to a young man who is somewhat lost. She’s lyrical, poetic and showcases the beauty of growing older.

I’d invite her to tea to: listen to her whimsical wisdom about living a life.