Let’s define heroine as not only the protagonist of a novel, but one who saves the day. Maybe through police work, maybe through solving mysteries, or maybe through supernatural ability…in any case she’s a hands-on type of character, who is also expecting a baby during the novel. The pregnancy doesn’t need to be the main focus of the story, ftr.
In Kelley Armstrong’s Broken the protagonist, a werewolf, Elena Michaels is pregnant with twins and continues to be her usual kickass self. I assume that Laurell K. Hamilton’s character Merry Gentry *eventually *did end up pregnant, but I stopped reading before then. If Fargo was based on a book it’d go into this list too, but I really am looking for books…
Who else has a world (or maybe just a neighborhood) to save while pregnant?
Frannie Goldsmith in Stephen King’s “The Stand” is pregnant throughout the novel and delivers just before the end. No one knows if her baby will survive the Super Flu.
In The Merry Wives of Maggody, the last* of the Maggody mystery series by Joan Hess, protagonist Arly Hanks is pregnant throughout. (Her pregnancy had been revealed at the end of the previous book.)
*So far, anyway, but after seven years it doesn’t look like Hess is ever going to pick up the series again, and Arly may never get to have that baby.
Hildy Johnson in Steel Beach spends part of the novel pregnant (also part of it male and part of it asexual). Yeah, it’s a little complicated.
Fawn in the Sharing Knife tetralogy starts off pregnant but miscarries (actually, the baby is killed, then she miscarries).
He’s not a heroine but Harry Dresden of the Dresden Files was pregnant for at least a couple books, but it was only in Skin Game that he learns the crushing headaches are due to being pregnant with a spirit child. BTW, it’s a girl. Yes, it’s complicated.
And while not the protagonist, Lady Alys as well. And then there’s those replicators… pregnancy is present throughout Bujold’s work, which I guess fits with her own remarks saying that all her books are about motherhood.
In the award winning TV adaptation of John le Carré’s The Night Manager English intelligence operative Leonard Burr became Angela Burr. The part was played by the conspicuously pregnant Olivia Colman. She won a Golden Globe for her performance.
One of the main characters in Stirred BY JA Konrath and Blake Crouch, a detective named Jack Daniels, is pregnant throughout the book. She may have been in the book before that–I don’t recall.
She’s certainly a heroine, but she has delivered Pearl by the time The Scarlet Letter begins.
In L. M. Montomery’s Anne’s House of Dreams, the heroine is pregnant twice. (She’s Anne of Green Gables grown up, by the way.)
Edit: Okay, I just reread the OP. I suppose Hester doesn’t exactly count as a heroine as defined, but she’s still not pregnant during the novel. As for Anne, I would argue that although she’s not saving the world, she is instrumental in the eventual rescue of another character who is in a desperate situation.
Scarlett O’Hara scandalizes society by going about her business while pregnant with her daughter Ella, in a time when pregnant woman stayed inside from the time they suspected they were pregnant. She’s my idea of a heroine, doing what has to get done regardless of society’s ideals.
