Amanda Craig’s STRONG GIRLS – FROM BITCH BOOKS  edited by Kate Figes.

Strong girls have always been around in children’s books and stories, but up until the 1960s you had to know where to look for them. One of my favourite fairy-tales is Molly Whuppie, a Scottish version of Jack the Giant-Killer. Cast out with her two sisters by their parents, Molly escapes four times from a wicked giant and his wife and wins half the kingdom and the king’s son as a result. In exchange for a husband for herself and each of her sisters, she steals the giant’s three most precious possessions (his sword, his purse and his ring), one by one. When the giant catches her and is about to kill her, Molly cleverly suggests he tie her up in a bag and go into the wood to cut the biggest stick he can find. While he’s doing this, she tricks the giant’s wife into climbing into the bag in her place.

Molly is clever, determined, brave and active – the opposite of the passive, sleepy or suffering heroines we associate with fairytales. But although there are other strong girls around, from Mossycoat to the brave Lassie of East O’the Moon, West O’ the Sun, children’s novelists have taken a while to rediscover them. One of the first, and best, is Mary in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Mary is so plain and sulky that other children call her ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary.’ Friendless and orphaned, she needs every drop of bad temper when she goes to live with her uncle at Mistlethwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. It is her restive boredom that pushes her to restore the secret garden, and her appalling temper that empowers her to stand up to her spoilt, sickly cousin instead of bending to his will. Although Mary becomes gentler and prettier (strange how those two attributes go together) she never quite loses her prickliness, and fierceness, and, as a junior version of Jane Eyre, it’s what you love her for.

Jo in Little Women lacks any trace of the malign, but she, too, is a strong girl. Clumsy, impulsive, energetic and perilously outspoken she is by far the most interesting of the March sisters, and the engine of all their adventures. You never forgive Louisa M Alcott for not marrying Jo to Laurie in Good Wives, but by making Jo a writer, supporting the whole family, she gives us one of the first portraits in children’s literature of a woman surviving by her own wits and energy.

Roberta in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children is similarly proactive. She loses her temper and makes her irritating younger brother almost faint playing a game, but it is she who stays behind in the dark railway tunnel with a wounded schoolboy, and she who discovers the truth about their missing father and who sets in motion the events that save her father when he is unjustly imprisoned. Similarly Anthea, in the Five Children & It trilogy is the one who not only persuades the waspish sand-fairy to give them one more wish but has the moral courage to confront unpleasant adults and get them to change their ways (with a bit of magical assistance.) The ideal big sister, Nesbit’s heroines are hugely important because they show girls that if they are determined, brave and resourceful they can change their world. They have their direct descendent in Harry Potter’s friend Hermione, “the cleverest witch of her generation” who is fearlessly bookish but also bold enough to punch Malfoy and outwit a werewolf.

All these strong girls have the advantage of starting off in nice, clean, middle-class families. One of my favourite heroines in literature has none of these. She is Dido Twite, the guttersnipe daughter of a family of treasonous crooks who makes her first appearance in Black Hearts in Battersea, the second of Joan Aiken’s twelve-volume Wolves of Willoughby Chase series. Dido is a cheeky, half-starved waif ignored by all until Simon the painter arrives in London and befriends her. In return for a few crumbs of kindness, Dido saves Simon’s life when he gets kidnapped – apparently at the cost of her own, for while he survives she is lost at sea. Yet it takes more than an ocean to kill Dido, a girl-Odysseus whose long struggle to return home involves confounding conspirators, outfacing witches and injecting spirit into various passive, terrified girls. Outrageously cheeky, with many rude phrases of her own invention, Dido is dirty, rebellious and brave in a way that makes her the undoubted ancestor of Philip Pullman’s Lyra in His Dark Materials.

Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracey Beaker is another girl from the rough side. Taken into a children’s home because her Mum’s monstrous boyfriend beat her up, she is violent and rude but longs for her mother to come and take her away. The book consists of her thoughts, fantasies and feelings as a troubled but affectionate 10-year-old who may never going to be rescued by an adult, whether this is the adoptive parents she has antagonised, the glamorous mother who has dumped her or the writer, Cam, who befriends her. Tracey makes you laugh and cry, though in real life you’d probably dislike her as a bully.

Lyra Bellacqua in His Dark Materials is the greatest of all bitch heroines. Passionate, imperious, and brave she first gets into trouble trying to rescue her best friend, Roger, who gets kidnapped by the evil Mrs Coulter. She learns to read the aleithiometer, or truth-compass, helps the huge armoured bear Iorek Byrnisson win back his kingdom, releases other kidnapped children before they can meet a fate worse than death and, with the help of Will in the second and third book of the trilogy, brings down God Himself. Her fierce will, loyalty and self-aggrandising lies all make you fall in love with her even if at times you (and the author) laugh at her, too. Like Sally Lockhart, the Victorian detective from Pullman’s earlier quartet, she is someone you’d definitely want on your side in a fight.  

I strongly suspect all these heroines are inspired by Gerda and the Robber Maiden in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, not least because so many seem to encounter evil in the frozen North. Lucy in CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe is unfortunately just a bit too good to be a serious opponent to the Empress Jadis, but later on Lewis makes a better fist of it with Aravis in The Horse & His Boy, and the distinctly stroppy Jill of The Silver Chair. Catherine Fisher’s Jessa in The Snow-Walker’s Son trilogy is known as “Two Knives Jessa”, and, like Lewis’s heroines, travels North to rescue the wicked Gudrun’s son and rival, Kari. Anne Halam has Sloe, a girl exiled in Siberia with her mother, who is the secret guardian of the tiny Lindqvists – the last “seeds” of all remaining wild animals in the world. Crippled and viciously courageous, Sloe makes her way across 1000 miles of ice and snow to save the animals and find her mother again in an enthralling fusion of fairytale and science fiction. Other wonderful heroines include NM Browne’s Ursula in Warriors of Alavna, Renn in Michelle Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness and Kitty in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimeus trilogy, who are fearsome adversaries. The fighting heroine has even made her appearance in Cressida Cowell’s hilarious books about the Viking nerd Hiccup, in the form of Kamikaze the small daughter of the terrifying Big Boobied Bertha (who suffocates her victims between her breasts.)

What is strange about these heroines is that, despite appearing more and more frequently in children’s literature, they are still pretty sparse in adult novels. For every VI Warshawski in the Molly Whuppie mould, there are far too many passive, romantic heroines who are direct descendents of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty – with the result that, in terms of self-confidence, literary heroines have actually gone backwards since the days of Jane Eyre. It’s ironic that girls get told they can be strong and self-determined as children, only to have the rug swept from under their feet as soon as they grow up.

Kate Figes’s Bitch Books is published by Virago, Spring 2007