One rainy holiday, Robert Louis Stevenson came up with the story of Treasure Island to entertain his stepson. The pair agreed that “it was to be a story for boys ... Women were excluded”.
This gender division was by no means new in adventure stories. In the 18th century, “a lady of adventure” was a prostitute. Early novelists including Aphra Behn, Anne Radcliffe and Charlotte Lennox, and memoirists such as Laetitia Pilkington, wrote stories of women expanding their horizons in far-flung, historical or gothic spaces. The act of publication was often just as scandalous as the contents. Samuel Richardson, whose novel Clarissa (1748) features a woman defending herself from attempted rape for over 1,000 pages, called these authors a “set of wretches” for failing to meet his standards of femininity. Jonathan Swift called Pilkington a “profligate whore”, though he admired her wit – which, we can all agree, was awfully nice of him.
My new novel, A Wild & True Relation, is a feminist smuggling adventure that came to me on the Devon beaches where the story takes place. It opens with smuggling captain Tom West coming ashore during the Great Storm of 1703 in a rage, believing his lover Grace has betrayed him to the Revenue. Following a confrontation, Grace is left dead, and Tom takes her daughter Molly to raise as a boy on his ship under the name Orlando. The novel is interleaved with historical figures such as Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot and Charles Dickens, who come together across the centuries to solve the mystery of Molly’s life.
I wanted to ask: what adventures can a woman lead? Where are our stories?
Adventure breaks the bounds of confinement. It’s flexible across genres. It is about the quest to define ourselves. Adventures means freedom. Here are my Top 10.
1. Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary by Celia Fiennes (1682-1712)
My only non-fiction pick, I couldn’t resist starting with Celia Fiennes, the woman who rode side-saddle on a donkey around England, solo, in the 17th century. Fiennes writes with beauty and bravery. She collects fossils and Bristol diamonds; prints her own name in Oxford; inspects anatomised bodies in Newcastle; and rides to the peak of the Malvern Hills in order to discover just how far her eyes can see without limits.
2. The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (1894)
Travelling to Ruritania for his cousin’s coronation, Rudolf Rassendyll is forced to impersonate the king when the real monarch is poisoned. Duels, swimming moats at night, forbidden love – it all starts with the opening line, a classic call to adventure: “I wonder when in the world you’re going to do anything, Rudolf?” It spawned the Ruritanian romance, a genre featuring adventure in a fictional country – a famous descendent is William Goldman’s sublime The Princess Bride (1973).
3. Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Spanning eras, genders and genres, Orlando begins life as a young nobleman in Elizabethan England and ends as a 1920s woman, via ambassadorship in Constantinople and arguments with Alexander Pope, in a 300-year bid for freedom. Woolf reveals boundaries to be entirely of our own construction.
4. The Spanish Bride by Georgette Heyer (1940)
While many of Heyer’s Regency Romances take place in England, The Spanish Bride mixes the Napoleonic wars, adventure and romance – or, in Heyer’s words, “all incident & love-stuff”. Heyer taught me dialogue. I love her wit, plotting and research. A true story, Brigade-Major Harry Smith and his teenage bride, the unwavering Juana Los Dolores de León, met on a Spanish battlefield, fell in love and were married two days later with the Duke of Wellington as a witness. Heyer wrote this novel as the second world war broke out. The lasting image is Juana riding alone into the Battle of Waterloo to find her husband.
5. Frenchman’s Creek by Daphne du Maurier (1941)
Escaping her husband and the restrictive Restoration court for Cornwall, Lady Dona discovers a French pirate ship hiding in her creek. She falls in love with Captain Jean Aubrey, but their idyll can’t last. Aubrey has freedom, and Lady Dona could have it, too, were she to leave her children. The ending is a devastatingly clear-eyed reflection on the responsibilities that can keep women from flights of adventure.
6. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
The epitome of a swashbuckling yarn, I carried my compact yet cannonball-heavy Everyman edition with me as a teenager so I could read its dense print any chance I got. I identified with d’Artagnan: I wanted to ride into a strange town, pick up a quest and a gang, and ride on to adventure.
7. Five Run Away Together by Enid Blyton (1944)
While much of the Famous Five books reflect the narrow-minded views of its time, the character of George was revolutionary and remained so for me as a girl with short hair who dressed in “boys’ clothes” and wanted nothing to do with Anne making house! Here, we get Kirrin Island, suspected smugglers and a kidnapping.
8. Modesty Blaise by Peter O’Donnell (1965)
This female-led series about a criminal-turned-spy deserves to be better known. The back copy of my editions calls them “the finest escapist thrillers” – as a teenager, I thought this meant Modesty was very good at escaping from captivity, which she is!
9. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)
Spanning the golden era of comic books, Josef Kavalier arrives in New York a refugee and teams up with his cousin Sammy Klayman to create The Escapist, a Jewish fusion of Superman and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Travelling from Europe to Antarctica, the novel is a quest to escape from the horrors of the Holocaust: “Having lost his mother, father, brother and grandfather … his city, his history – his home – the usual charge levelled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf.”
10. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (2018)
While much adventure fiction begins with a privileged white man escaping boredom (see John Buchan’s 39 Steps), the genre is at its most powerful when the protagonist is reaching for adventure as the opposite of tyranny. That’s the case in this blistering novel following George Washington Black, born into enslavement on a Barbados plantation run by the English Wilde brothers. Beginning with a hot-air balloon escape, the novel is globe-hopping in the vein of Jules Verne, and shares DNA with Robert Louis Stevenson in its fraught coming-of-age dynamic between a boy and a father-figure. But overlaying these is the terror and brutality of slavery. Edugyan asks what freedom means in a mind and body haunted by trauma.
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Top 10 adventure stories for girls - The Guardian
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