5 Real Women Whose Lives Should Inspire YA Novels

You cannot make some stuff up, which is why historical fiction and YA are a match made in heaven. Marie Antoinette, Cleopatra’s daughter, Joan of Arc, Emily Brontë, Louisa May Alcott—they’ve all gotten young adult novels, and we want more (MORE, we tell you!). Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, and there’s something very cool and inspiring about knowing that this. Actually. Happened. Here are five real women whose fascinating and sometimes outrageous lives require the YA treatment now. Who were they as teens and how did they become who they became?
Mary Shelley
Too late! I’m on it. For the past few months I’ve been working with another author on a YA novel about the life of Mary Shelley (yes, that Mary Shelley) and her teen love affair with Romantic poet Percy Shelley. Mary (née Wollstonecraft Godwin) was born the daughter of one of the first radical feminists. Her mother died just days after giving birth, and Mary was raised by her nearly broke writer/philosopher father and an honest-to-goodness wicked stepmother. She was not yet 17 when she eloped to Switzerland with the already married 22-year-old Percy, and 18 when she started Frankenstein. She and Percy would spend their young adult years wandering Europe, writing ghost stories and reactionary poetry, and getting debauched with the baddest literary rock stars of their era. And that doesn’t even get into the love triangles (plural). If you’re more the poetry type, the verse novel Hideous Love is a place to start.
Sappho
Historians actually know very little about the original “lesbian,” the source of the term (from Lesbos, the Greek island from which the lyric poet and purported lady lover hailed). Here’s what they do know: She was born sometime around 615 B.C.; she had many brothers, a husband, and a daughter; she ran a school for unmarried young women; and her poetry, mostly about love and desire, was so extraordinary Plato called her the tenth Muse. Most of her poetry survives only in fragments and as quoted by other writers, partially because she was considered so scandalous Pope Gregory ordered her work burned in 1073. Now, YA authors, fill in the blanks!
Daphne Du Maurier
Du Maurier is known mostly for her 1938 gothic novel Rebecca, which has been described by one reviewer as “Jane Eyre if Rochester mattered much less, and the mad wife in the attic much more (and if it turned out that poor Bertha Mason had, in her day, given some amazing dinner parties),” but what many don’t know is just how downright interesting she was as a person. As the children of prominent actors, Daphne and her two sisters created dashing alter egos and a secret language they would carry through their teens and into adult life. She might have been transgender and bisexual, and she lived in Egypt for a time, where her husband was stationed and where she started obsessing over his former fiancée and an old Cornish estate she had admired as a young woman—sound familiar?
J.K. (aka Joanne) Rowling
A modern Cinderella story, only instead of being rescued by a fairy godmother and a prince, Rowling transformed her own life with her bibbidy bobbidy creative brilliance and a publishing contract. (Mic DROP!) Rowling has said she was not a particularly happy teen (does such a thing exist?), quiet and introspective but bright and a lover of fantasy stories, not unlike her own Hermione Granger. The years before Harry Potter were difficult ones. Joanne lost her mother to multiple sclerosis. She was married and divorced from a man she met in Portugal and living on government assistance as a single mother. She has stopped speaking to her father, who auctioned off the first edition of Goblet of Fire she signed for him for Father’s Day (cold, dude). And yet, her name will go down as the author of the best-selling and perhaps most beloved book series in history (for now—writers, take hope), worth almost a billion dollars. Keep your glass slipper.
Tavi Gevinson
If Mozart was a girl who lived today instead of in the 18th century, and his gift had been fashion and blogging instead of music, he would be Tavi Gevinson. Tavi was just a normal old Chicago preteen with an English teacher dad and a weaver mom, but by the tender age of twelve, she’d made herself into a fashion and feminist icon, thanks to her blog Style Rookie. Now, at eighteen, she’s the editor-in-chief of Rookie magazine, a published author, a TED presenter, a model, and one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30 in Media.” Anna Wintour basically has a small shrine of Tavi in her office, which she prays to and feeds three times daily. Oh yeah, she’s also a Broadway actress. And she has lots of “cool older girl mentors,” including Stevie Freaking Nicks. We hate-love her so bad.