On historical heroines

Both real and fictional

One of the most heartbreaking questions I get as an author of historical romance and historical fiction is this: how do you write a historical heroine with agency? 

There seems to be an idea that for most of history, women were passive participants. They were just there, embroidering and aspiring to marriage. We struggle to imagine them on the battlefield, in the government, or making fortunes. We struggle to imagine them yearning for more than being a wife, a mother, a duchess. We can’t imagine novels about them will be any fun.

We all sort of “know” that a woman’s place is/was in the home and they never left or did anything interesting. Early critics of the novel said this is why women would be terrible novelists—because their “experience in life is seldom wide and never deep.”

What’s needed is agency—making choices and having power over oneself. The laws and yore time made it pretty impossible for a woman to make choices (Elizabeth Bennet can choose marriage or spinsterhood—no one ever suggests she get a job) and a married woman certainly had no power over herself. The law then said married women couldn’t own property (including their own wages) and they could not have custody over their own children in the rare event of divorce or more likely event of becoming widowed. 

So it’s a fair question. But I find it heartbreaking because historical women were amazing.

Because somehow, here we all are, wearing pants, reading and writing, having professional lives, and doing historically audacious things like going out to dinner alone without causing an outrageous scandal.  

How did we get from there to here? 

We did not just wake up one day with pants, credit cards and freedom. We owe it all to real historical women. And historical heroines can remind us of how far we’ve come. 

Historical heroines demonstrate female agency in a world that doesn’t want them to have any—and they get it. Starting with marriage for love. 

Historical romance heroines are amazing. They are doctors, astronomers, politicians, geologists. Even if they are “just” society misses intent on making a match, they demonstrate agency because they also do the one revolutionary thing that all these historical heroines have in common. They marry for love. 

To be historically accurate, choosing to marry for love is the one choice, the first choice, perhaps the only choice women were allowed to make about the direction of their lives. This is the central focus of many historical romances. In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamelia Regis writes, “Her choice to marry the hero is just one manifestation of her freedom.” 

I write about this a lot in Dangerous Books for Girls. Marriage was changing and women seized the opportunity to do it on their terms. Choosing to marry for love asserted a woman’s autonomy. Historical romance—Regency romance especially—tells that story over and over again. 

Whenever we read or write about heroines making that choice we celebrate the idea of women having autonomy over their own lives and that they find true everlasting love and community support for it. 

Real historical heroines demand agency from a world that doesn’t want them to have any—and they get it.

Real historical women were amazing, despite the impressions we get from history lessons. Someone had to be the first woman to go to medical school, get her hands on a telescope, get involved in politics,  become a geologist. They defied the rules and went on adventures. 

In doing so, they changed what was considered possible for women. 

In real life, women teamed up together and fought to change the world so women would have more agency—the right to education, the right to work, the right to equal pay, the right for married women to own their own property or keep their wages. One thing they fought the hardest for was the right to custody over their own children. What all these fights have in common is recognizing a woman as a person of authority and agency over themselves. We are still fighting for these rights.

I guess what I’m getting at is this: A historical heroine with agency is the same as any heroine with agency. She gets to make choices and how power over herself. And she does so in a world that doesn’t recognize her right to do so. 

That we DO have a world that does recognize freedoms for women—and that sparks outrage when it doesn’t (I’m looking at you, Supreme Court)—is due to the revolutionary work of real historical women. 

What is the HEA for a historical heroine? 

I think the heroines of historical romance are some of the most dynamic heroines around. In particular, the rules of the Regency or Victorian England give them so much to push against. We can feel the pressure and constraint they faced and marvel at how they stay so spirited from page one until the last chapter. 

But what happens when those dynamic historical heroines choose to get married after spending a few hundred pages defying conventions? Is it, as Pamela Regis writes in A Natural History of the Romance Novel, “just one manifestation of her freedom?”  Or is it a failure? 

Psst: that’s the topic of next week’s post!

But to answer the original question: how to write a historical heroine with agency? Write her as you would a woman in any era.