As children, we soon learned, it was different for boys. While they had Superman, Desperate Dan, a legion of Bash Street Kids and the Hardy Boys, for girls, sturdy female heroes were thin on the ground. The pages of Bunty were riddled with ladies who swooned, and simpering boarding-school girls who dreamed of ponies, while on television women were always assistants, love interests or girls who got the collywobbles at the sight of a ghost or a spider. Boys had heroics and derring-do; girls had niceness and a saggy old cloth cat. Yes, for the most part, the fictional heroes of our childhoods adhered to stereotypes hewn from fairytales, where the men were princes and we were all winsome Rapunzels. So when there were exceptions we held on to them, tightly.
One of the finest female heroes is about to return to our cinema screens. Created in 1930, Nancy Drew was the girl detective who showed she was far superior to those Hardy Boys by doing her detecting work herself, in tales that invariably culminated in the phrase, “If it hadn’t been for you, Nancy Drew, I would have gotten away with it!” She made a marvellous role model for young women — independent, resourceful and staunchly convinced of the prevailing power of womankind; as she put it in The Clue in the Diary, “Calm your nerves. Three capable, muscular, brainy girls such as we shouldn’t need any help!”
While it is traditional for heroes of either sex to be an outsider, it is far more subversive in the case of a girl hero. Women who choose to live outside social conventions have long been treated with more suspicion than men. Often, in fiction, they use this to their advantage — Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher (of Murder She Wrote) rather benefited from being the observer, slightly removed. But there are downsides; while many male heroes enjoy the attentions of an adoring woman, few female heroes are awarded a love interest.
But the best girl heroes didn’t give a damn; they had business to attend to. Minnie the Minx (b 1953), for example, was the Beano’s resident rascal in pigtails, and easily a match for Dennis the Menace. Following firmly in Minnie’s footsteps was Marmalade Atkins. Beloved of the generation who grew up in the early 1980s, Marmalade was a tykish schoolgirl, always wearing a sweatband around her unruly curls and blowing bubblegum. What was brilliant about Marmalade and Minnie was their badness — indeed, Marmalade was promoted as “the worst girl in the world”. She was, as my friend Lucy notes gleefully, “one of the few noisy, scruffy role models for girls”. From a young age, girls are generally encouraged to be “sugar and spice and all things nice” and I, like Lucy, recall the sheer exhilaration of seeing a female character misbehave.
Of course, what you look for in a fictional hero is often some reflection of yourself — my mother, the eldest of five children, felt a kinship with the terribly responsible Meg from Little Women, while most of my peers fell for the writerly Jo: “I so identified with her,” says Lucy, “back when I too knew what it was to be consumed by the act of scribbling.” As a quiet, rather maudlin child, I harboured an affection for the silent, tragic hero of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid. Later I would transfer my affections to Anne of Green Gables, the red-headed orphan created by LM Montgomery, because she was a daydreamer who loved books and yet satisfyingly feisty with it; similarly, a few years later, I fell for the well-mannered rebelliousness of Lucy Honeychurch in EM Forster’s A Room With a View.
While the heroes of Judy Blume or Paula Danziger’s novels were often confused by teenage yearnings, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five girls provided a neat delineation of the type of girl you were: an Anne or a George. The surly, artistic tomboy George was always at pains to show she could do things every bit as well as a boy. Anne, meanwhile, was the dreary one who cried easily and was forever making sandwiches. “I always wanted to be the wussy girly one in The Famous Five,” admits my friend Alice. With Anne as a role model, Alice has blossomed into a rather glamorous lady, while I, a George-lover, remain a scruffy, tree-climbing sort. The heroes we cling to as girls seem to set our course.
But, if there is a single thread that links these fictional girl heroes, it is surely that they were all people who knew their own state of mind, who were brave and strong and articulate — whether they were the perennially cynical Lucy from Peanuts, the sharp-witted Lisa Simpson, or the wisecracking Miss Piggy. They were young women, too, who knew no boundaries — whether they were Marmalade Atkins breaking school rules or Nancy Drew sidestepping danger. They taught our young minds that we could go anywhere and do anything. What could be more heroic than that? — Â