Perspective.
What classic novel written by a woman predominantly features or follows the perspective of a man?
Two of the greatest novels ever, Flaubert's Bovary and Tolstoy's Karenina, are about fallen women. They are both written with empathy (not just sympathy) for them and tries to probe into how they think. This is the same with most of the work of Hardy. George Gissing's The Odd Women, about women left out of the marriage pool, is one of his best works. Then there is the work of Henry James and EM Forster, whose best characters are basically all women. My favourite moment in Joyce's Ulysses is with Gerty, when the perspective is changed to that of a young woman, and we see how she sees Bloom (or how Bloom thinks she sees him, I can't be quite sure). There is also Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end, but I don't think anyone has ever enjoyed reading that, even fans.
Highsmith's Ripley? Highsmith, a butch bisexual who preferred the company of submissive women, seems suited to write a novel about an anxious queer. Not that it is a particularly good novel- the film adaptations are miles better- but it does feature the internal thoughts and perspective of a man. I felt Dickie in the novel is so unlikeable that Ripley's attraction to him was unconvincing. If it was just money and status for Ripley, then fine, but that is not what Highsmith is going for. That is why the films are improvements over the novel. They understand male attraction better.
George Eliot perhaps, but then in those novels- Adam Bede and Daniel Dermonda- it is a 50-50 split between the main male and main female character. That is not the same as Tolstoy, Flaubert, or Hardy. Nevertheless her male characters are interesting, though perhaps too morally pure.
There is the Septimius section in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, and the moment where Walsh thinks he is being stalked in London (I assume is a reference to Poe's 'Man in the Crowd'). Both sections capture extreme emotions, the former depression and the latter anxiety and paranoia- much like Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley- feelings Woolf had intimate relations with. She also wrote Jacob's Room, a novel about how we can barely understand people through observations and words.
Sorry, but the conversation about female therapists got me thinking.
A lot of young women I know who read classics bother only with ones written by women. Older generations tend to be quite different. I know a few who love Dickens, as all decent people should.
I will offer an example: Ted Hughes and Silvia Plath. Right after her suicide, most of the sympathy was with Hughes, who was the better poet (that's not even up for debate). My old English teacher thought Plath's death was attributable to Plath not understanding the English working class that Hughes was born into and slightly blamed her privileged background for her death. Plath was also suicidal before she met Hughes, something rarely mentioned nowadays. And there was the attraction Hughes had over women. He was for many a living Heathcliff. Women love the badboy loner.
Now the sympathy is with Plath. The Bell Jar is still popular and Hughes is little read. His Birthday Letters, the book about her suicide, is a far better literary product than The Bell Jar, but it lacks that tragic background that readers love, but that seems disingenuous to me. As any reader of Hughes' work would know, suicide does not have one victim. A husband and children also suffer the loss of a loved one. That is the perspective we need to learn.
The modern predominance for confessional writing, The Bell Jar being the Moby Dick of this style, is of a people unwilling to see a fresh perspective. There is no growth in one view of the world. The 'I' is endless. It can be as shallow or as full of depth as you want. We learn far more about ourselves through our observations of others than we do observing ourselves. If you seek to be validated in reading, then what is the fucking point?
Edit: Forgot to include Agatha Christie, though her work is less about the character as it is about the plot.