Current-running anime Silent Witch has an interesting take on the second one. She is accomplished as a scholar because her father taught everything he knew, it's all borrowed knowledge, and her "special power" is that she mastered spellcasting with no chanting, because she wanted to be passive, invisible and a shadow upon the wall. Her prompting into the story is due to a male colleague hiring her on as a covert agent (she said no, so he then just went dominant, and her submissive nature agreed to it).

It is a shoujo anime, but just your descriptor of "a realistic feminine woman" pretty closely matched, so it came to mind.