(no subject)

[coraa]

I have a reason for this inquiry, which will be explained in the fullness of time!

I'm looking for suggestions of books with unreliable narrators where the narrator is female (besides Larbalestier's Liar, which I've already got in mind). I'd prefer speculative or historical fiction, but if you have a great example from another genre, by all means share it.

Secondarily, I'd love suggestions of books prominently featuring female liars (or con artists) regardless of whether they're unreliable narrators. Again, speculative or historical fiction preferred, but great examples from other genres would be useful too.

The books don't necessarily have to be good, for what it's worth.

(rachelmanija and sartorias and I tried to think of examples in the car, but with limited success.)

Comments

[ithiliana]

*thinks*

None come to mind.

The major unreliable narrators in 'canon' parts of brain are all men.

Hmmmmm.....

[ithiliana]

Turn of the Screw????

[starlady]

Well, the only female liar I can think of is Lyra in His Dark Materials. Not sure about your other requests… 

[jazzfish]

ooh, interesting.

Jane Eyre isn't wholly reliable from the perspective of Wide Sargasso Sea, but that's not at all what you're asking for.

Mickle, from Lloyd Alexander's Westmark, takes to the life of a con artist like a duck to water. I have an idea that there are other Alexandrine street-urchin heroines who lie and con but I may be imagining it.

Stepping outside the genre, I would imagine that noir is filled with such women. Brigid O'Shaughnessy from The Maltese Falcon comes immediately to mind.

[oursin]

For a wonderful and neglected novel about a female con-artist, I highly recommend G B Stern's The Woman in the Hall - this was published around 1939 which probably told against its making a mark. I will give further thought to the question of unreliable female narrators.

[oursin]

There's at least a couple of Tanith Lees in which, at the very least, what the female narrators think turns out not to be the way things are - The Birthgrave and Electric Forest.

Does 'having amnesia' count? The events of Mary Gentle's Ancient Light rely rather heavily on the narrator having memory problems (I think something to do with long term effects of the accelerated language learning for her job as a diplomat) and not remembering large amounts of what happened in Golden Witchbreed.

[legionseagle]

Probably one of the reasons I strongly prefer Golden Witchbreed (though the moment when the static noise stops is supremely chilling in AL).

Better on liars and con-artists

[legionseagle]

Moll Flanders
Gone With The Wind (if you avoid the romance parts; what Scarlett really needed wasn't Rhett Butler; it was reliable contraception and a V-P position at Microsoft).
Vanity Fair

Also, much of Wilkie Collins, particularly Lydia Gwilt (Armadale)

[zeborah]

Unreliable narrator: Villette by Charlotte Bronte.

Featuring female liars: Dangerous Liaisons (original "Les Liaisons Dangereuses") by Choderlos de Laclos, and Lady Susan by Jane Austen.

I'll keep pondering for actual specfic examples.

[legionseagle]

What's unreliable about Lucy Snowe?

[oursin]

She conceals her knowledge that Dr John is the erstwhile Graham(?) Bretton, as I recall.

[zeborah]

She casually doesn't tell us all sorts of things that it would have been much more natural to tell us, until she's forced to because the narrative would make no sense if she didn't. Mostly re Dr John, I think: that it was he who helped her (with her luggage when she first arrived? my memory's vague), and of course his identity, and that she's madly in love with him. But I have a feeling there were other minor things too. Oh no, I'll have to reread it!

The ending was intended to be ambiguous - that was the author rather than the character, acting on external constraints, but otoh it does fit Lucy Snowe's personality very well too.

[vito_excalibur]

Yes, I came here to say Villette. :)

Does Ariane Emory from Cyteen count?

[legionseagle]

Joan Aiken. Dido Twite.

[legionseagle]

IRRC, isn't there something rather fundamentally unreliable about Harriet Hume? And the main characters in All Hallows Eve?

[oursin]

As I recall, it's Condorex, not Harriet, who turns into an unreliable narrator.

[legionseagle]

Ah. Maybe they'll get Bruce Willis to play him in the film.

[green_knight]

Can't think of unreliable narrators (but then again, I hate unreliable narrators and bounce off them badly). Juliet McKenna jemck has written a sequence of books with a female gambler/thief/con artist as protagonist - starting with The Thief's Gamble. They are utterly excellent anyway.

[meaghan_bullock]

Ah, yes! Livak is a very entertaining narrator. I found the latter 4 books to be not as good as the first (a problem I also had with Melanie Rawn's Dragon Prince books, in which the first book is much better than the successive five but oh how I love that first book). However, the worldbuilding is pretty universally excellent in that series.

[green_knight]

I never liked the rest as much as the first, but I recently reread them, and I appreciated them much more. The shift beween first and third POV no longer disturbed me, and I really *love* that it has a strong relationship that does not form a Romance subplot - they negotiate their relationship without artificial barriers and it's so refreshing to read.

[cofax7]

Dorothy Dunnett, Dolly & the Singing Bird. Actually, ALL the Dolly books have pretty unreliable narrators, but Singing Bird is the best of those. Or maybe Dolly & the Bird of Paradise, to a somewhat lesser extent.

If you haven't read them, they're mystery/thrillers written & published out of internal chronological order but set in the year each was written (which makes your head hurt, I know), all narrated by a young woman who has an adventure with a British portrait painter/spy named Johnson Johnson and his yacht Dolly.

[oyceter]

Tilda in Jennifer Crusie's Faking It is a reluctant con artist, as is Letty Potts in Connie Brockway's The Bridal Season. (Both romances)

E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks has a heroine who is a prankster in boarding school who felt very like a con artist to me. (And she enjoys it! Unlike most female thieves/con artists/liars/etc I can think of)

Books that have unreliable narrators but not because the narrator is deliberately lying:

I feel the narrator in Rebecca is very unreliable (in fact, everyone is debating the book in my comments right now!), but I am not sure if she canonically is?

Claudia Gray's Evernight has an unreliable narrator. (Actually, I feel it is less of an unreliable narrator and more of a narrative cheat, but YMMV?)

Diana Wynne Jones' The Merlin Conspiracy

But overall my personal theory is that there are even fewer female con artists than female thieves and spies and assassins (whyyy?!) because "con artist" implies some measure of enjoyment of the con and the game, which most people seem to be reluctant to assign to women because of the morality? At least in romances, they always make sure you know the heroine is doing it against her will! or not to hurt people! or because she is in a tight spot! as opposed to actually liking it.

[coraa]

That ties into something I'm noticing as a pattern: most of the female liars I can think of (or that I recognize in the suggestins others give me) are either lying because they're mentally ill somehow, or are lying because they are forced by monstrous circumstances, or are lying in order to protect someone or save the world or whatever. Most of them don't lie because they enjoy it, or for personal gain.

But it's far too fuzzy-edged to be a real theory.

[aquaeri]

Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair? Although she's bordering on "exception that proves the rule".

[zeborah]

Lady Susan lies for personal gain (but she's painted strongly as a fairly two-dimensional villain).

In Dangerous Liaisons, the Marquise de Merteuil lies because she doesn't want anyone telling her what to do and preventing her from having sex with whomever she wants. She's also painted as a villain but much more sympathetically (Choderlos de Laclos was something of a feminist; I once read a rant of his on how of course women aren't that clever, because no-one bothers to educate them).

[zeborah]

I tried searching LibraryThing for:

Unreliable narrators in fantasy
Unreliable narrators in science fiction

However a bunch of them aren't fantasy or sf respectively, and an overlapping bunch aren't unreliable narrators, and of course large numbers have male protagonists. It might be worth it as a source of inspiration maybe?

It did remind me that in Megan Whalen Turner's Attolia series, the Queen of Attolia gets to take her turn as a point-of-view character. She's not as unreliable as Gen but it's something.

It also brings up "The Yellow Wallpaper". Not a book though.

[holyschist]

I just picked up Ally Carter's Heist Society, which has a female protag con artist/theif from a family of same. Have not read it yet.

[coneycat.livejournal.com]

We Have Always Lived In the Castle by Shirley Jackson?

(The narrator is unreliable in more ways than one, I think.)

[amberdulen.livejournal.com]

I don't know how far your definition of "prominently featuring" stretches, but lying con-artist women are common in noir and mysteries. I'm thinking of The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon specifically, but I'm sure TV Tropes would turn up more. Not sure how many you'd find as the actual protagonist, though.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Holly Black's White Cat doesn't have a female narrator, but the women are as unreliable as the men.

OH--Sean Stewart's MOCKINGBIRD! (It's arguably subtle and not plot-changing, but still.)

I think of Liza in Bones as unreliable, but she's not lying, she's just wrong, which isn't the same. Ditto Tirnay in Secret of the Three Treasures, who reinterprets everything she sees through an adventurer's lens. I tend toward first person especially when a protag sees the world in an inaccurate sort of way.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I don't recall the narrator in Mockingbird being unreliable - how so?

[janni.livejournal.com]

At the end she tells us she couldn't possibly be telling this story, not being much of a storyteller, and that her mother's spirit helped her. Doesn't change the story itself, but I was struck by it.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

Also Bad Monkeys, by Matt Ruff.

[paperclippy.livejournal.com]

I could use some more details . . . I think most female villains are liars, so I would guess any book with a female villain would fit the bill. Also, what does "unreliable narrator" mean?

[coraa.livejournal.com]

An unreliable narrator, as I define it, is the narrator of a book who is reporting the action of the book inaccurately, usually (but not always) for their own benefit. For example, Liar is told from the first-person point of view of a pathological liar, who lies to the audience as much as to the people around her.

[paperclippy.livejournal.com]

Hmmm . . . off the top of my head I can't think of any. Although in terms of female con artists, the book I was recently reading but didn't get very far in -- The Lies of Locke Lamora -- was implying that there had been a female member of their con-artist team who was missing. I don't know if she ends up playing a major role in the book or not.

There are certainly female liars in Pride and Prejudice (Bingley's sisters). I would say that Livia in I, Claudius is a masterful liar and schemer. In Maledicte, the protagonist is a liar, criminal, and murderer (she is also sort of transsexual, so I don't know if you would count her).

I'll keep thinking to see if I can come up with anything else.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

Found this post via sartorias's Sirens' posts.

Trick of the Light by Rob Thurman.

[alicebentley]

Another case of "I'm not at all sure this will be helpful" but,

Full Moon o Sagashita is a seven-volume manga that might fit the need.

[larryhammer]

Some of Jane Austen's omnicient narrators -- I'm thinking of Northanger Abbey in particular -- are unreliable, but I'm not sure this quite fits the bill. For one thing, we never get any indication of the narrator's gender.

The only other 19th century example I can think of by a woman author is Jane Eyre. I'm pretty sure, um, let me see, a novel by Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White? I think??) in which there is an extensive testimony from a female character, not all of which is veracious -- I forget whether she was giving false or unreliable testimony, though.

If you just want lying female characters who aren't villians, the heroine of The Eustace Diamonds. But she never narrates, and the omniscient narrator always immediately points out when she changes her story.

---L.

[larryhammer]

Come to think of it, most first-person narrators of gothic novels, of the sort that Northanger Abbey is spoofing, are of dubious reliability.

---L.

[praetorianguard.livejournal.com]

I'm not finished yet, but I'm betting that the narrator in Bleeding Violet turns out to be unreliable. She's a hallucinating manic-depressive living in a town of demons, so I'm not entirely clear where the reality line is.

Also, not in speculative or historical fiction: Hope in Selling Hope lies day in and day out; in fact, the entire plot is premised on her lying. And most of Ally Carter's heroines (Gallagher Girls, Heist Society) lie constantly.

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is one of my favorites (mentioned above).
Books with female narrators who lie: Notes from a liar and her dog, The Year of Secret assignments, and Arabella.

[dancambull.livejournal.com]

One of the main characters (Eliza) of The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson might be considered a kind of con-artist, and probably thought herself to be a pretty good one.

[jennifergale.livejournal.com]

Lyra (in Pullman's Dark Materials books) was a liar, but I don't think her lies affected the storytelling.

I know of a few short stories, but they aren't speculative or historical.

What a stumper!

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Hmm....
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters.
God Stalk by P.C. Hodgell
Angel With the Sword by CJ Cherryh

Young Adult
Fly By Night by Hardinge Frances
Westmark (and its two sequels) by Lloyd Alexander

I'm not sure those are useful or what you are looking for. There is one that I just can't remember the name of. The main character was Satin? Sateen? Something like that.

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Ah! The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber. (The main character's name is Sugar.) I seem to recall she is both delusional and duplicitous in her dealings and recollections. And, of course, there is always-always Scarlett of Tara fame. She decides what is real and what isn't, and lies whenever she wants.