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The bookshop was narrow enough that two people passing in the same aisle had to negotiate the distance between their shoulders. Its shelves rose nearly to the pressed-tin ceiling, and wherever the orderly sections failed, books accumulated sideways across the tops of other books, wedged beneath display tables or gathered in low stacks beside the radiators. The front half of the shop held new releases and literary fiction beneath clean white lights. Farther back, beyond history and biography, the lighting softened into a yellowish gloom that smelled of old paper, dust and the faint medicinal sweetness of floor polish.
Jenny stood near the end of the illustrated-fiction aisle with a canvas shopping bag resting against one ankle. She had already found the volume she wanted. It was tucked against her chest beneath one arm while she considered another edition on the shelf, comparing the cover art and trying to decide whether owning both would be indulgent or simply sensible. The second book had several pages of sketches in the back that the first lacked. That counted for something. She opened it carefully, using only enough pressure to keep the binding from closing, and leaned nearer to examine an early drawing of Sonja’s face.
There was nothing passive in the expression. Her eyes were turned slightly away from the viewer, intent upon something beyond the frame. The artist had caught the stillness before action, the concentration beneath the beauty. Jenny liked that more than the usual snarling or dramatic display. Sonja did not always need to be charging, bleeding or standing over a body to look formidable. Sometimes the intelligence in her face was enough.
Two customers entered the aisle behind her. Jenny heard them before she looked up: the dry friction of a coat against the shelves, a man breathing a little heavily from having come in out of the cold, a woman asking whether the books they wanted were farther down. They sounded middle-aged, comfortable with each other, neither hurried nor particularly interested in anyone else around them. The man stopped near a display of collected editions and lifted one from its stand.
“This is the one I was talking about,” he said. “The chainmail girl.”
The words did not arrive loudly. He had not announced them to the shop or used the contemptuous voice of someone deliberately trying to provoke. He sounded merely certain that nothing more needed to be said.
Jenny kept her eyes on the sketchbook page.
The woman beside him examined the cover. “Red Sonja?”
“That’s her. I could never take that seriously. Sword in one hand, practically nothing on everywhere else. You can tell exactly who they expect to buy it.”
The woman gave a small, noncommittal sound. “The cover is a bit much.”
“It’s the whole character, isn’t it? Chainmail and red hair. One of those fantasy women made for teenage boys.”
Jenny turned a page without reading it. The irritation rose in her without heat. It had become familiar enough that she recognized its exact shape: not anger at someone disliking what she liked, and not the defensive panic of a fan unable to hear criticism, but the weariness of watching a woman reduced to the easiest visible fact about her.
It was always done with the confidence of discovery.
They saw the metal, the skin, the red hair and the sword, then congratulated themselves for having solved her. No need to ask what she wanted, what she feared, what choices she made when brute force would not save her, or why she could walk into a room full of kings, thieves, mercenaries and sorcerers without surrendering ownership of herself. A glance at the cover had become permission not to read.
Jenny knew the costume was designed. She knew ink did not choose where it lay upon a page and fictional women did not argue with artists in dressing rooms. She did not imagine Sonja climbing out of the panels at night to make her own decisions while writers slept. The hand of the creator was present in everything: the angle of a hip, the amount of skin, the posture, the framing, the convenient tear in cloth that exposed more of a body at exactly the right moment.
But that was not the only level upon which a story operated. Within the world on the page, Sonja wore what she wore. Within that world, she knew men looked. She knew some underestimated her because they mistook exposure for vulnerability and beauty for availability. Their mistake belonged to them. Her body did not become an apology merely because another person desired it.
And even outside the story, where writers and artists made every choice, the presence of sexual appeal did not erase everything else they had put into her. A woman could be drawn attractively and still be written intelligently. She could appeal to readers visually and remain more than an arrangement of attractive parts. The suggestion that beauty contaminated depth seemed to Jenny almost as foolish as the suggestion that strength made beauty impossible.
She closed the book in her hands, though she kept one finger between the pages.
The man had begun turning through the collected edition. He paused over an interior panel and gave a faint laugh. “There it is again. Every battle, and somehow that thing stays on.”
Jenny looked at him then. He was broad-faced, with silver gathering at his temples and a scarf still looped loosely around his neck. His companion had short dark hair and reading glasses hanging from a cord. Neither appeared unkind. The man’s expression held more amusement than malice, which somehow made the dismissal more irritating. Cruelty could be confronted as cruelty. Laziness often believed itself harmless.
Jenny waited for the natural pause between them and said, “Excuse me.”
They turned. The man looked down first, then seemed to check himself and bring his attention properly to her face.
Jenny held the book against her chest with both hands. “I heard what you said about Red Sonja. I know you weren’t speaking to me, and I’m sorry for interrupting, but I don’t think the chainmail is the whole character.”
The man’s eyebrows rose slightly. His companion looked from Jenny to the book she was holding.
“No,” he said after a moment. “All right. I suppose it wouldn’t be.”
Jenny could have left it there. His answer was polite enough to release her, and she felt the old instinct to accept the smallest opening and retreat before she risked becoming inconvenient. She looked down at the red-haired figure on the cover. Then she lifted her eyes again.
“It isn’t even most of her,” she said. Her voice remained soft, but she did not let the sentence dissolve at the end. “It’s only the part people remember without reading. She’s clever. She notices when someone is trying to flatter her, or frighten her, or make her angry enough to stop thinking. She can fight, of course, but she survives things that strength alone wouldn’t get her through. She reads people very well. Sometimes better than the people writing her seem to realize.”
The woman’s mouth shifted, not quite a smile, though her interest had sharpened. “You’ve read a great deal of it, then.”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “Not every issue. I’m still looking for some of the older ones. But enough to know she isn’t just standing around in chainmail while men have adventures.”
The man glanced at the cover again. “I didn’t say she stood around.”
“No, you didn’t.” Jenny’s answer came gently. She did not want to trap him inside words he had not used. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to put anything worse into what you said. But when you called her the chainmail girl and said that was the whole character, it made everything else sound unimportant. It’s all right if you don’t like her. I only don’t think it’s fair to decide there’s nothing there because the first thing you notice is her body.”
The man took this without visible offense, though he looked more surprised now than amused. “The first thing they want me to notice is her body.”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “Usually. I think that’s true.”
Her agreement seemed to interrupt the response he had been preparing.
Jenny shifted the weight of the books in her arms. “Some covers are ridiculous. Some artists draw her as though her spine couldn’t possibly support her. Sometimes the story is trying very hard to make sure you keep looking at her breasts even while she’s talking about something important. I don’t think people are wrong to notice that. I notice it too. But that still isn’t all she is.”
The woman lifted the book slightly from the man’s hands so she could see the cover unobstructed. “You don’t think the costume makes her a sex object?”
Jenny considered the question. She disliked the way the phrase often became a door slammed on further thought, but the woman had asked sincerely, and Jenny wanted to answer what she meant rather than what other people sometimes meant by the same words.
“I think she can be treated like one,” she said. “Sometimes she is. But being sexy isn’t the same as being nothing except sexy. And a person being looked at isn’t the same as that person having no self beyond the looking.”
The man pressed his thumb into the edge of the book and studied her. “She isn’t a person.”
“I know.” Jenny nodded at once. “I know she’s made up. She doesn’t have real agency. Writers decide what she does, artists decide what she wears, and publishers decide what goes on the cover. I’m not pretending she made herself. But inside the story, she makes choices. That’s part of how fiction works. We know somebody wrote the choice, but we still judge the character by it.”
She paused, arranging the thought before continuing.
“When she chooses the armour in the story, that matters to the story. It tells you something about how she sees herself. She isn’t embarrassed. She doesn’t believe she owes anyone modesty so that they can behave properly. If someone looks at her and forgets she has a sword, that’s useful to her. If someone looks at her and remembers the sword, she still hasn’t lost anything. She knows what she looks like. She knows she’s attractive. That doesn’t make her foolish.”
The woman lowered her glasses onto her nose and opened the book near the beginning. “Does she actually choose it? I always assumed that was simply how she was drawn.”
“The history changes depending on which version you read,” Jenny said. “Some explanations are better than others. Sometimes there isn’t much explanation at all. But she isn’t usually written as if she has been forced into it and spends every page wishing for trousers. She moves as though it belongs to her. That’s important to me.”
The man nodded slowly, though his expression suggested he remained unconvinced. “It can belong to her because a man decided it should.”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “That’s true too.”
He looked at her more directly, perhaps expecting resistance.
Jenny did not offer it. “A man can write a woman choosing something because he likes looking at women who make that choice. Those two things can both be true. The reason behind the page and the meaning inside the page aren’t always the same. I don’t think we have to pretend the men drawing her had no interest in her body. Of course they did. But I also don’t think their interest automatically destroys every good thing in the character.”
The woman had begun turning the pages more carefully. “You separate the intention from the result.”
“Sometimes,” Jenny said. “Not completely. The intention matters. But readers bring things too. A girl can look at Sonja and see something different from what a man expected her to see.”
“What did you see?” the woman asked.
The question made Jenny glance down at the volume she had chosen. Sonja stood against a black background with her sword angled across her body. Her hair spread around her shoulders, bright enough to look almost alive. Jenny ran one thumb along the book’s uncreased spine.
“She doesn’t ask anyone to make her less noticeable,” Jenny said. “She doesn’t apologize for being strong or beautiful. She can enjoy being wanted without believing she belongs to the person who wants her. She can refuse somebody and not become cruel. She can say yes and not become weak. She can be angry without the anger making her stupid. When she is frightened, it doesn’t mean she stops being brave.”
The man’s expression eased a little at that. “That sounds like a generous reading.”
“I hope it is.” Jenny’s voice warmed, though her firmness remained. “I love her. I don’t want to love her by pretending the bad stories are good or the silly pictures aren’t silly. Sometimes people who defend a character defend everything, and then nobody can have a sensible conversation. There are stories where she’s written badly. There are pictures that care about nothing except putting her body in front of you. But when she’s written well, the clothes don’t make her shallow. They just make her recognizable.”
A customer squeezed behind them with an apologetic murmur, carrying a stack of mystery novels. Jenny stepped closer to the shelves to give her room, then returned her attention to the pair. The small interruption gave the man time to look over the page his companion had opened.
He said, “You must admit the practicality is questionable.”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “Very.”
The immediate answer drew a brief breath of laughter from the woman, but Jenny did not laugh at the man or turn the agreement into a victory.
“She should be cut to pieces in some of those battles,” Jenny continued. “So should most of the men who fight without helmets. Fantasy armour is often more interested in silhouettes than keeping anyone alive. Conan wears very little sometimes too, but people usually don’t decide that means there’s nothing in his head.”
The man turned another page. “Conan has rather more clothing in some versions.”
“He does. And Sonja has more in some versions too. I like some of those designs. I don’t need her to wear the same thing forever. But I mind when people act as if giving her more clothes is the same as giving her dignity. She already has dignity when she’s nearly naked. Clothes can change how other people treat her, but they don’t create her mind.”
The woman’s gaze lifted from the page. “That is a fair point.”
Jenny smiled at her, pleased but not triumphant. “Thank you.”
The man closed the book partway, keeping his place with one finger as Jenny had done. “I still suspect the costume is there primarily to sell comics to men.”
“I think selling comics to men is part of it,” Jenny said. “Maybe a very large part, depending on the artist and the year. But men aren’t the only people who like looking at beautiful women. And looking isn’t the only reason someone keeps reading.”
She took a breath, aware that she had been speaking for longer than she usually allowed herself. Neither of them had turned away. The man was listening, if not agreeing. The woman seemed genuinely curious. Jenny felt no need to rush simply because she had become the center of the exchange.
“A cover can get somebody to pick up a book,” she continued. “That doesn’t mean the cover can make them care. Maybe someone buys the first one because Sonja is beautiful. Then they read it and find out whether they like her. If there’s nothing inside, they won’t all stay. Some people will, I suppose. But the readers who love her for years usually love more than the costume.”
The man looked at the book in Jenny’s arms. “What do you think they love?”
“Different things.” Jenny glanced at the shelves as if the books themselves might help her arrange the answer. “Some love the fights. Some love the world. Some love that she doesn’t belong to any king or husband or army for very long. She can work with people without becoming theirs. Some readers like that she’s difficult to contain. Some probably do only like the way she looks, but I don’t think that harms her. It only means they aren’t interested in all of her.”
She looked back at him.
“What bothers me is when someone who hasn’t read her assumes the readers haven’t either.”
The man’s forehead creased. “I didn’t say that.”
“No.” Jenny’s expression remained open. “You didn’t say it directly. But when you said you could tell who the books were for just by looking at the costume, it sounded as if you thought the readers were all the same. That they saw the skin and wanted nothing else.”
He seemed to weigh this more seriously. “That was probably unfair.”
“A little,” Jenny said, so kindly that the admission did not become a punishment.
The woman returned to the first page and read several panels. “What would you say is a good story?”
Jenny’s face brightened, though she restrained the impulse to begin naming everything she loved. “Do you mean a good place to start?”
“Yes. Something that shows what you’re describing.”
Jenny set the second edition carefully atop a nearby pile, freeing one hand. She leaned toward the book the woman held, though she did not take it from her.
“That collection has some good ones, but it changes a lot from story to story. This one here is better than the cover makes it look.” She indicated a title in the contents without touching the page. “She spends most of it trying to stop two groups from killing each other over something neither of them understands properly. There is fighting, but she knows fighting alone will make it worse. And this one later is good because she realizes somebody has arranged the whole situation to make her seem reckless. She has to control her temper long enough to prove it.”
“So she has a temper,” the man said.
“A terrible one sometimes.” Jenny smiled faintly. “She isn’t perfect. I wouldn’t want her to be. She can be proud, and she can decide too quickly that she understands somebody. She doesn’t always know when kindness would work better. But those are flaws attached to who she is. They aren’t only excuses to make the plot happen.”
The woman read the titles, tracing down the list with her gaze. “You’ve thought about this.”
“Yes,” Jenny said.
There was no embarrassment in the admission, though a flush had begun to warm her cheeks. Her passion did not feel childish to her. The books had given her too much pleasure, too much thought, too many private arguments for her to pretend indifference merely to appear sensible.
The man shifted his scarf away from his throat. “I’m not sure I would call walking into battle dressed like that a sign of intelligence.”
Jenny nodded. “If it were real, I wouldn’t either. I wouldn’t advise anyone to fight in it. But the story doesn’t obey real rules in every other way and then suddenly become a documentary when it reaches her clothes. People survive falls they shouldn’t survive. Swords cut through things they shouldn’t cut through. Magic works. Monsters exist. Men fight bare-chested and don’t die from the first infection.”
She spoke without impatience, laying each point beside the last rather than firing them at him.
“If someone says the whole world is absurd, that’s consistent. But when the only impossible thing that ruins the story is a woman wearing too little, I wonder whether the problem is really practicality.”
The man’s lips pressed together, not in anger but in thought. “What do you think the problem is?”
“Sometimes people are embarrassed by her,” Jenny said. “Not everyone. Some people simply dislike the design, and that’s fine. But sometimes they see a woman who knows she is being looked at and doesn’t hide, and they decide she must not know anything else. They feel more comfortable calling her silly than admitting she might be both exposed and in control.”
The woman folded one arm beneath the other, cradling the book against her coat. “Do you always see her as in control?”
“No.” Jenny’s answer came with equal certainty. “There are pictures where the pose makes her look arranged rather than alive. There are stories where the danger is only an excuse to tear her clothes or threaten her in the same way again. I don’t like those. I don’t think saying she is strong means pretending nobody has ever used her badly.”
She glanced at the cover in the woman’s hands.
“But bad treatment by a writer doesn’t prove the character was empty all along. It proves that writer did less with her.”
The man rubbed the corner of the cover with his thumb. “You’re making a distinction most people probably wouldn’t bother making.”
“I wish they would,” Jenny said. “Not only for Sonja.”
The aisle had grown quieter around them. At the front of the shop, the register drawer opened with a metallic clatter, and somebody asked whether a receipt was needed. A cart of newly priced books waited at the end of the aisle. One wheel leaned at an angle, making the whole thing appear permanently on the verge of rolling sideways.
Jenny looked toward the covers surrounding them: women with swords, women in gowns, women held by painted men, women standing alone against ruined cities. So many were reduced before the first page. The beautiful one. The angry one. The cold one. The mother. The victim. The girl with the gun. The girl in leather. The woman whose body was taken as evidence against her mind.
She looked back at the man.
“I don’t like when a woman has to become unattractive before people believe she has depth,” Jenny said. “Or when she has to cover herself before they believe she respects herself. There are shallow beautiful women and clever beautiful women. There are modest women with great courage and modest women who are cowards. Clothes can tell you something, but they can’t tell you everything.”
The woman’s expression had softened. “No. They cannot.”
“And if somebody is turned off by Sonja’s costume,” Jenny continued, “they don’t have to read her. Attraction isn’t a duty. Nobody has to find her empowering or tasteful or beautiful. But the people who do find her beautiful aren’t necessarily missing the point. Beauty may be part of the point for them. It’s part of the point for me.”
The man looked briefly surprised by the plainness of that admission.
Jenny did not lower her eyes. “I think she’s gorgeous. I like the red hair and the chainmail and the way she carries herself. I like looking at her. That doesn’t stop me hearing what she says. It makes me want to look longer, and then there has to be enough in the story to keep me there.”
The woman smiled now, not indulgently but with recognition. “That may be the best defense of the commercial cover I’ve heard.”
Jenny’s own smile appeared in response. “Some of the covers are still awful.”
The woman laughed softly. “You are allowed that.”
Jenny’s attention returned to the man. He had not laughed, but neither had he withdrawn. He opened the collection again and examined the first pages with a seriousness absent before.
“I still think the chainmail is absurd,” he said.
“It is,” Jenny replied. “Absurd things can still mean something.”
“And you think calling her the chainmail girl misses everything that matters.”
“I think it misses everything except the chainmail.”
He looked at her for another moment, then gave a slow nod. “That is difficult to argue with.”
Jenny shook her head slightly. “You can argue with it. I don’t mind. I only wanted you to know there was more to argue about.”
His face changed then, not into conversion or enthusiasm, but into a more careful regard. He had expected, perhaps, a complaint about insulting a favorite character, a defensive declaration that Sonja was powerful and therefore beyond criticism. Instead, Jenny had agreed with several of his objections and refused the conclusion he had built from them. The difference seemed to interest him.
“You made the case well,” he said. “Better than I would have expected from someone overhearing half a conversation.”
“I heard enough of it,” Jenny said, then immediately softened the firmness with, “But thank you.”
The woman turned the book over to check the price. “I think we should buy it.”
The man looked at her. “For whom?”
“For me, perhaps.”
He gave her an uncertain smile. “You don’t read these.”
“I may read this one.”
Jenny felt pleasure rise within her, but she did not claim the decision as proof of victory. The woman might read ten pages and dislike it. The man might finish the exchange still believing the costume fatally undermined the character. Neither possibility made the conversation worthless.
“There are other collections I like more,” Jenny said. “You don’t have to start with that one just because it’s here.”
The woman’s smile deepened. “You are not a very ruthless salesperson.”
“I don’t work here.”
“I had gathered that.”
Jenny looked again at the book she had set aside. “I only don’t want you to buy the wrong one because I talked too much.”
“You didn’t talk too much,” the woman said. “You answered the question.”
The man closed the collection and handed it to his companion. “And corrected the premise.”
Jenny recognized the compliment without mistaking it for surrender. “A little.”
He inclined his head. “A little.”
The woman asked which volume Jenny would recommend instead, and Jenny showed her two possibilities. She explained the difference between them, pointing out that one had stronger individual stories while the other gave a better sense of Sonja over time. She warned them that both contained uneven artwork and that one opened with a story she found disappointing. The man asked whether that was because of the costume. Jenny said no, it was because Sonja solved a problem by failing to notice something she would normally have noticed at once, and the explanation given later did not convince her.
For several minutes the conversation became ordinary. They compared editions. The woman checked the prices. The man read the first page of one story and then another. Jenny answered what she knew and admitted what she did not. She did not try to recruit them into devotion. She spoke about the books as books rather than sacred objects, affectionate enough to criticize them and critical enough to know why her affection survived.
At last the woman chose the collection Jenny preferred. She held it beneath one arm along with a novel she had been carrying when she entered the aisle.
“I cannot promise I will agree with you,” she said.
“You don’t have to.”
“But I will read it before deciding she is only the chainmail girl.”
Jenny’s smile became broad and unguarded. “That’s all I meant.”
The man slipped his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ll read it too.”
“You still don’t have to like it,” Jenny told him.
“I understand.”
“And if you hate it, you may have good reasons.”
“I understand that as well.”
Jenny nodded, satisfied that nothing more needed to be extracted from the moment. “I hope there’s something in it you enjoy.”
The pair moved toward the register. The woman thanked her once more, and the man gave a final acknowledging lift of his hand before following. They spoke quietly as they went, their words lost beneath the creak of the floor and the rustle of customers turning pages.
Jenny remained in the aisle.
The exchange had not transformed the shop. No one applauded. The man had not confessed to a lifelong habit of underestimating women, and the woman had not declared Sonja a feminist revelation before reaching the register. They would carry the book into their own lives and make of it whatever they made. Perhaps it would sit unread on a table for months. Perhaps one of them would dislike the first story and never continue. Perhaps they would finish it and remember Jenny only as the intense little woman in the back of the shop who had spoken with startling seriousness about a fictional barbarian.
That was enough.
Jenny picked up the second edition again and reopened it to the page she had marked. The early sketch of Sonja waited there unchanged, her gaze fixed beyond the edge of the paper. Jenny studied the line of her brow and the concentration in her eyes.
She thought of the moment before she had spoken, the easy chance to remain silent. Silence had once felt so much like goodness to her. It meant not troubling anyone, not making herself heavy in another person’s day, not demanding room where none had been offered. Yet there had been no cruelty in what she had done. She had not humiliated the man or treated ignorance as wickedness. She had simply refused to let his sentence stand as if nobody nearby knew better.
The realization settled without drama.
She could be kind and still interrupt.
She could speak firmly without turning another person into an enemy.
She could love something without lying about its flaws, and criticize it without surrendering her love.
She could take the easy phrase offered to a woman—the chainmail girl, the pretty one, the body on the cover—and patiently unfold everything it had attempted to crush.
Jenny looked from the sketchbook pages to the volume already tucked beneath her arm. After a moment’s consideration, she decided to buy both.
The extra drawings were worth having.