Do we like Bella Swan?
A character from Twilight (2005)
Our score: 5 out of 10. Brave, loyal and kind. But she sets her own safety aside for a boy, and she string-along-ishly leaves her friends in a muddle. We'd back her, with a sigh and a seatbelt.
Bella Swan is the narrator and heroine of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series. In the first book she leaves sunny Phoenix to live with her father in the small, damp town of Forks, Washington. She is shy, bookish and famously accident-prone. She quickly becomes fascinated by the secretive Cullen family, and especially by Edward.
Her best qualities are her quiet strength and her loyalty. She has long looked after her flighty mother and her lonely father, and she doesn't back down when danger shows up. Her flaws are just as clear. She is stubborn, she fixates on one relationship at the expense of everything else, and she can be careless with the feelings of friends who care about her. That mix of courage and poor judgment is why she lands in the middle of the scale.
As the series goes on, Bella commits to a future with the Cullens. She gets engaged, marries Edward, and eventually becomes a vampire herself. Meyer has said that although Bella starts out physically weaker than those around her, she grows into one of the series' most powerful characters. Readers still argue over whether the journey is empowering or whether she gives up too much for love.