big, fat, horrible married woman as the heroine?" Beauty was the only currency a woman could call her own. Hence this 140 years later, from George Eliot (a woman who was definitely more of a thinker than a looker) on Dorothea Brooke on the first page -- in the first sentence! -- of Middlemarch: "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress." Or this -- from the first line -- of Jane Austen's Emma: "Handsome, clever and rich." Where the plain are ...
