When a strong female character is central to a novel's appeal, an audiobook performance has to find the right tone.
There's something invidious about choosing audiobooks on the basis of a named month during which virtue is signaled, but with International Women's Day behind us, I feel less sheepish about taking advantage of Women's History Month (also known as March) to talk about five works of audible fiction with distinctive female characters.
Mattie Ross is one of the toughest dames in American literature. Conjured by Charles Portis for his 1968 classic, "True Grit," Mattie is 14 when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father, robbing him, she tells us, "of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band."
From the remove of many decades, Mattie relates in the novel how, in 1878, she sets off from Arkansas to catch her father's killer, who has fled to Indian Territory. She hires Rooster Cogburn, a sottish one-eyed U.S. marshal (played on film in 1969 by John Wayne and in 2010 by Jeff Bridges) to help get her man. Mattie and Rooster are joined in the hunt by LaBoeuf, a handsome Texas Ranger in search of bounty, and, by the end of the chase, Mattie's pony has died underneath her, she herself is snakebit, and the reader is very likely in tears.
In the 2006 audio version of "True Grit" (Recorded Books, 6h15m, $17), Mattie's dry, no-nonsense voice is delivered with absolute fidelity by, of all readers, Donna Tartt. Ms. Tartt, a novelist whose works include "The Secret History" (1992) and "The Goldfinch" (2013), grew up in a Portis-loving family and brings deadpan perfection (along with pitch-perfect Southern vowel shifts) to Mattie's tale of tenacity and vengeance.
Jayne Entwistle brings an apt sense of smallness to Edward Carey's 2018 novel, "Little" (Penguin Audio, 14h14m, $20.25). The story tells of an ill-favored child, Marie Grosholtz, who's born in an Alsatian village in 1761 and orphaned a few years later. Nicknamed "Little" for her stature, the child finds employment in the household of a shy anatomist whose trade is making wax replicas of human body parts. As the doctor's apprentice, Little moves with him to Paris where she helps sculpt figures for his new wax museum. With the French Revolution raging, some of the heads they model are still warm from the guillotine. Later, in England, Little gains fame as the waxwork impresario Madame Tussaud. In the audiobook recording of this surprising and intricate story, Ms. Entwistle's words come across as those of a small person who is confidingly self-aware. Her voice, paired with Mr. Carey's writing, creates a beguiling audio backstory for a woman whom time has rendered as unreal as one of her waxen figures.
In "The Wayfinder" (Macmillan Audio, 26h50m, $33.74), a 2025 novel by Adam Johnson, author of "The Orphan Master's Son" (2012), the young heroine Kōrero aspires to become the storyteller of her people, who are slowly starving on an island stripped of its resources. "Were our lives normal, were we living the way we were meant to live?" we hear her think in the voice of the actress Waikamania Seve. Alternating every two or three chapters, Ms. Seve and the actor Caleb Teaupa unfurl a blood- and brine-soaked epic set in and around the islands of long-ago Polynesia. The lilt of the performers' Antipodean accents lends a strong sense of place to the novel, which with elements of magical realism tells of exploration and violent conquest, of navigation by constellations and by old stories, and of cruelty and intrigue in the royal court of Tonga. Ms. Seve reads softly, with a relatively uninflected delivery that has the effect of allowing the writing to shine, even if, on occasion, it makes some unfamiliar terms (moko, tapu, taonga) tricky for the listener to catch on the fly. It is not Kōrero's fate to be a storyteller -- her destiny is attached to other stars -- but she is a compelling half-narrator of a harrowing and sophisticated novel that is marred only by a late tonal shift that results in an oddly cheery ending.
Few heroines of English literature have as distinct a voice as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Generations of readers have felt their hearts throb in sympathy with the orphaned Jane as she undergoes a deprived childhood -- cheering when she rebukes her unloving aunt -- and later felt the thrill of anticipation as Jane, now grown and a governess, falls in love with her brooding, tormented employer, Mr. Rochester. The actress Juliet Stevenson brings her characteristic clarity to her reading of the classic "Jane Eyre" (Audible Studios, 19h13m, free with an Audible subscription), giving life and spirit to Jane and making effortlessly intelligible every line of dialogue and Brontëan turn of phrase. The quality of Ms. Stevenson's voice is like crystal under velvet; clear-edged yet somehow soft; her diction is as crisp as a fresh green apple.
With successful audiobooks, the narrating voice and the original prose do not have to align exactly but there must be a sense of harmony so that the finished recording comes to the listener as a single coherent work of art. Alas, with Allegra Goodman's 2026 novel, "This Is Not About Us" (Random House Audio, 12h11m, $21.60), writer and reader are not, as it were, on the same page. Ms. Goodman, whose previous novels include "Kaaterskill Falls" (1998) and "Isola" (2025), here tells the story of the extended Rubinstein clan whose members live in suburbia in the Northeast. It is not a novel with huge dramatic arcs but something more like a work of pointillism in which small dots of ordinary conversation and activity combine to create a larger picture of contemporary Jewish family life. We get to know the two surviving elderly matriarchs Helen and Sylvia who fall out over a trivial dispute (about apple cake) after the death of their sister. We see how remote the emotional realities of the older generation appear to those who are young and sure and full of their own promise such as Sylvia’s vegan eco-friendly violinist grandniece Phoebe.
Unfortunately for the listener, the actress Kimberly Farr seeks to infuse Ms. Goodman’s careful unadorned prose with too much energy. At one point, for example, she reads a passage in which a woman polishes silver “until it gleamed.” The phrase is self-explanatory but Ms. Farr is insistent; so in her reading the woman polishes silver “until it gleamed.” An audio reader daren’t go flat for fear of droning on and boring the listener but as this audiobook shows excessive buoyancy also carries a risk.