A friend asked me recently, why do women read Romance? What are they looking for? There are so many good reasons, but let’s start with the heroine.
What I want in a heroine is someone who is not necessarily “like” me, but she needs to be relatable. Someone who I can understand their situation and how they got there, and have sympathy. Or if I won’t find out all of that until later, there’s got to be something about her I “get” and I can relate to. What leaves me cold in a heroine is someone who acts irrationally for no reason except plot convenience, or is overly dramatic/weak/passive.
The worst of all is when she’s shown entirely at the surface level with no inner beating heart. They’ve got to make sense psychologically, for me. That’s why I rate Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot (Persuasion) so highly, she absolutely makes sense to me. As writers they have to feel real to us, then we work hard to convince our readers too.