My article on ten female protagonists created by male authors was published by Readers Digest last week. I was asked to write it because the protagonist in my debut novel Wrecker, also published last week (by HQ (Harper Collins), is female.

Wrecker is told from the point of view of Mary Blight, a poor young woman in early nineteenth century Cornwall who we first meet pulling a pair of boots from a corpse after a shipwreck.  That wasn’t my original intention. Earlier drafts were told from several different points of view, including that of a man. The decision to put Mary’s voice to the fore was made to focus the story.

It would be interesting to round up ten male protagonists created by female authors. Any suggestions?

When I began researching the article I immediately came across a thread on Twitter where a male author who boasted about his abilities to channel his inner woman was lampooned by women. This is clearly not a step to take lightly.

When I submitted my novel to agents the man who ultimately came to represent me  didn’t know the gender of the author and assumed the book was written by a woman. When he then sent the book out to prospective editors (most of whom were women) they too assumed the novel had a female author. So I seem to have got away with it.

I take the view that a writer has the right to write about whoever they want, regardless of whether they share our gender or any of the other ‘protected characteristics’ in the UK Equality Act (2010). If we get it wrong, then readers, critics and other writers have a right to point that out.

Below are the ten novels I chose with female protagonists which are written by men and where the authors are generally judged to have got it right To find out why I chose them, check out the article in the Readers Digest.  (I slightly bent the rules in one or two instances where the female character was the most memorable even if not technically the protagonist).

Which authors and novels would you put on your list? And if we turned the tables and looked at male protagonists created by female authors, which novels would you choose?

• Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
• Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (1875-77)
• Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy (1891)
• The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (1880-81)
• Atonement, by Ian McEwan (2001)
• The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber (2002)
• The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor (2002)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (2005)
• Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (2009)
• The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides (2011)