I don’t know if I can fairly call this a mini-trend, since it seems like something that’s been ongoing since I was a teen, but it’s one I love: historical girls who join all-female secret groups or societies to carry out dangerous but important activities. Usually the secret group has an innocent, innocuous, and thoroughly gender-appropriate cover – it’s a finishing school or a nunnery; the girls learn to be lady’s maids or governesses. In reality, though, the girls learn how to spy, how to kill, how to be physically and intellectually powerful in a world where otherwise they would have had almost no agency of their own.
Women and girls in the time periods highlighted in these books generally would have had very little power in any of the traditional roles, and I think this is a fun way to subvert that. Y. S. Lee, who writes the excellent Agency series, states as much in her author’s note, which I return to again and again:
Women’s
choices were grim in those days, even for the clever. If a top secret
women’s detective agency existed in Victorian England, it left no
evidence – just as well, since that would cast serious doubt on its
competence. The Agency is a totally unrealistic, completely fictitious
antidote to the fate that would otherwise swallow a girl like Mary
Quinn.
The title of her series is a nod to this as well, I think.
Complicating these stories is the fact that in many of them, the girls are forced against their will into these secret societies. What does that say about the power they have – or don’t have – within the group compared to the world at large?
I have always been drawn to these sorts of stories. As a girl, it was a
way for me to have my cake and eat it too: I could escape to another
time while also not encounter all the strictures of that historical
period most girls would have endured. A lot of what I read as a teenager
was a way for me to read about girls with power (magical and
otherwise), since I felt I had so very little of it myself. I think this
is a major reason these stories continue to be popular today.
I’ve collected just a smattering of recent titles that explore this concept below. Each book is the start of a series, and all descriptions come from Worldcat. I’ve linked each title to either Goodreads or my review.
Maid of Secrets by Jennifer McGowan
trained as a member of the Maids of Honor, Queen Elizabeth I’s secret
all-female guard, but her loyalty is tested when she falls in love with a
Spanish courtier who may be a threat.
Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers
Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the
sanctuary of the convent of St. Mortain, where she learns that the god
of Death has blessed her with dangerous gifts–and a violent destiny.
Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger
Sophronia, a fourteen-year-old tomboy, has been enrolled in a finishing
school to improve her manners. But the school is not quite what her
mother was expecting — here young girls learn to finish…everything.
As well as the finer arts of dress, dance and etiquette, they also learn
how to deal out death, diversion and espionage.
The Agency by Y. S. Lee
Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan and thief Mary
Quinn is offered a place at Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls where she
is trained to be part of an all-female investigative unit called The
Agency and, at age seventeen, she infiltrates a rich merchant’s home in
hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships.
Have I missed any biggies published for teens within the past few years? I’m looking specifically for historical titles, so stories about girls training at a secret school to be spies in modern times aren’t the target (though I do love those sorts of books, they are not quite the same). Do you read and love these books as much as I do?
Cross my Heart by Sasha Gould and Venom by Fiona Paul both have girls in secret societies in historic Venice.