A certain something

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor is great and Geisha, A life by Mineko Iwasaki is another great one with the elements you describe.

Welcome to A2k jora.

Isn't most of Sidney Sheldon books like this?

Welcome Jora

Jora, whereas not necessarily any element of defeating a great evil, i would recommend any of Jane Austen's novels for a view of a woman's self-expression in narrowly defined circumstances. Her work is usually categorized as satire; while the entertainment value is often to be found in satire, her characters are "true to life," and the relegation of her work to a "satrical" genre ignores the significant dimension of having given a voice to women's lives two hundred years ago.

If you would be interested:

Sense and Sensibility,
Pride and Prejudice,
Emma,
Mansfield Park,
Northhanger Abbey,
Persuasion.

For a similarly acute and accurate view of the place of women in 19th century society, George Eliot (née Maryanne Evnas) wrote many intersting novels:

Adam Bede,
The Lifted Veil,
The Mill on the Floss,
Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe,
Romola,
Brother Jacob,
Felix Holt, The Radical,
Middlemarch

The final novel, Middlemarch, is by far the best. In both the novels of Austen and those of Eliot, the struggle women are obliged to engage in is against the roles society assigns them, rather than a vague and enormous evil. In Middlemarch, the heroine struggles with her disenchantment, and to rise above the circumstance of having married someone she considered a religiously devout and virtuous man, who proves to be neither. Many of the characters of the early Austen novels are caricatures rather than descriptions of "real" people, but her style rapidly improved. Persuasion ought not to be thought of as satire at all--her characters look like fools because they behave foolishly. In that novel, all of the characters, male and female, are very real portraits. Eliot's early work is often melodramatic by our standards, but i think she understood men much better than male writers of her era understood women. Romala and Felix Holt are rather boring reads, actually, and the turgid melodrama was over the top even for my taste, and i love 19th century literature. But the characters she describes and the struggles they face in life are very real, and worth reading about.

You might like 'Smilla's Sense of Snow' by Hoeg. The character of 'the mechanic' is sort of ambiguous.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385315147/qid=1084585157/sr=8-2/ref=pd_ka_2/102-8105766-5290531?v=glance&s=books&n=507846