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Showing posts from November, 2017

The Unconventional Heroine in Historical Fiction

  This is an edited version of a talk I did for Bristol Literary Festival 2017 (‘Stories of Strong Women: Unconventional Heroines’). The original talk also considered the ‘feisty’ heroine, which I’ve written about in a previous blog - Xena Warrior Princess v Patient Griselda . Historical fiction loves unconventional heroines. I take such a heroine to be unconventional both because she kicks out against the conventions of the time and place in which she exists, and because she challenges the reader’s image of women in the past. She does work that’s deemed to be masculine: a quick scout around the internet turned up historical romances about a newspaper reporter, geologist, astronomer, and mathematician. She refuses to accept the subservient role foisted onto women: she says no to arranged marriage, she makes her own choices about where she goes and who she sees. Or she wears men’s clothes, and in donning them she also miraculously assumes knowledge of male spaces and ma