nekare

Er, I have issues with women in Latin Culture - the whole puta-o-santa thing has always bothered me, and I feel it restricts us horribly as human beings as well being very restricting in terms of fiction, and the kind of stories that can be told with women. Meh.

I am surprised you got The Great Gatsby rec'ed in a previous comment - it's an extraordinary book, and I love it, but it's very bleak and depressing and Daisy is an empty ideal, more than a character - and a horribly weak and unpleasant woman in the end.

None of the women in WH come across as likeable, but I don't have a problem with that. I would argue, though, that seeing Heathcliff as your average mean bastard who beats up women is a rather unfair and simplistic way of reading the novel (not denying he's a nasty piece of work, mind you!). A lot of feminist theory argues - and quite convincingly, too - that him and Cathy are coded as adrogynous and that Heathcliff becomes Cathy's avenging angel when she is stripped off her power and married off to the more civilized (and no less monstruous) Lintons. So in a way Heathcliff becomes the embodiedment of her anger - WH is very gothic, claustrophobic and incestuous, but it's all about nature vs. culture in the end - and about the need, finally, to find a balance, as Catherine eventually goes full circle (the first Cathy is Catherine Earnshaw-Heathcliff-Linton, and the second is Catherine Linton-Heathcliff-Earnshaw), the property is restored to the rightful heir and Cathy - significantly, I thought - is fully accepting of Hareton as a potential mate, but teaches him to read and "civilises" him to a certain extent.

If you want interesting - troubling, complex, well-written female characters, these come to mind:
* Gwendolen from Daniel Deronda by George Eliot is a wonderful character, very charismatic, certainly more memorable than the title character of the novel. Bitchy, selfish but full of drive and very strong-willed. She makes one bad decision after and other and lives to regret it, but in the end grows into a better person for it. Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (by the same author) is dreamy, sensitive, imaginative and lives in extremes - all barely restrained, passionate anger clashing with piteous self-denying morality. Both are madening, very frustrating, and very long novels, but they are both wonderful heroines.
* A somewhat unconventional - and contemporary! - rec: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. A Dickensian mystery full of thieves, conmen, reclusive heiresses and child thieves set in Victorian England... but written in the 21st century with a very Queer studies sensibility. Same author as Tipping the Velvet, so the lesbian theme's a given - this one is a good deal tamer, though, and it subverts some cliches of the genre quite deliciously. Both heroines (the heiress and her pickpocket-turned-maid-turned-conwoman) are wonderful.