The phrase "active heroine" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a female character who takes initiative and plays a significant role in driving the plot forward, often in a positive or empowering way.
Example: "In the novel, the active heroine defies societal norms and leads her community towards change."
Alternatives: "proactive female lead" or "dynamic female character".
Such complaints have led to a recent spate of revisionist fairytale films, with active heroines and a blurring of the lines the old stories set up between good and evil.
The Czech movie Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku) (1973) is no doubt all too sweet, yet it delivers a far more convincingly active version of the heroine than American cinema has managed to produce, while inviting us to partake in a wistful winter world that is still a nourishingly earthy and rustic place.
Camane (Emily Blunt), the politically active vestal virgin, is the heroine of this episode.
The author insists that her heroine play an active part in her own salvation -- not for McKinley a hundred years' slumber ended by a kiss from a handsome prince.
The hero carries on his active public life, while the heroine, no matter how plucky she's been in the preceding 40 chapters, is happy to pick up her needlepoint and disappear into the land of happy ever after.
These are compliments in context, as it happens, and perhaps part of Shreve's appeal is that she steps back while others step forward: it is a feature of much mass-market writing, not to mention other forms of entertainment such as film and computer games, that heroes and heroines must take active steps to shape their destinies.
Likewise "Black Swan's" alter-ego rivalries and divided-ego visions connect intimately to the good-bad, white-black, active-passive Odette-Odile heroines of "Swan Lake".
"I like to be active in a role, and hate namby-pamby heroines," she said.
In Rebecca and in Suspicion (1941), Fontaine's next film for Hitchcock, the heroines – although that's rather too active a noun for them – marry men more exciting and worldly than they believe they are entitled to.
