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First published in Great Britain by HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Text copyright © Holly Kyte 2019
Illustration copyright © Becky Glass 2019
Cover images: Dorothy Jordan by John Hoppner, 1791 © National Portrait Gallery Duke of Aumale by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1846 © Bridgeman Images Lady Diana Cecil attrib. to William Larkin, c. 1614 © Bridgeman Images
Holly Kyte asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008266080
Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780008266097
Version: 2019-11-21
Spellings, capitalisation and italicisation have been silently modernised throughout for clarity and consistency.
For Mum and Dad, for everything.
roaring girl: (n) a noisy, bawdy or riotous woman or girl, especially one who takes on a masculine role
OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
MARY PRINCE: Goods and Chattels
CAROLINE NORTON: A Painted Wanton
AFTERWORD: Unfinished Business
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Girls, we’re told, are not supposed to roar. We’re supposed to shut up, be quiet, stop nagging. We’re supposed to calm down, dear. If we don’t, we’re bossy, we’re aggressive, we’re nasty, we’re bloody difficult. We’re a bunch of loud-mouthed feminazis and hysterical drama queens. If our skirts are too short, we’re asking for it, but if we don’t make an effort, we should be ashamed. If we don’t speak out, how can we expect recognition? But if we do speak out, we get trolled. And that’s in the twenty-first century, after four waves of feminism, when equality has supposedly been won.
Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re a woman in the seventeenth century. In your world, feminism doesn’t exist. You’ve been born into a rights vacuum. Your life is one long list of obligations and prohibitions. Your sole destiny as a wife and mother has been preordained since day one and the feminine ideal expected of you is to be chaste, modest, obedient – and, whenever possible, silent.
But what if you don’t want to be silent? What if you want to roar?
Mary Frith was just such a woman. A notorious cross-dressing thief in Jacobean London, she was smashing up every rule in the book when she swaggered onto the stage of the Fortune Theatre in the spring of 1611, dressed in a doublet and a pair of hose, sword in one hand, clay pipe in the other, to perform the closing number of the play she had inspired. It was called The Roaring Girl.
A Roaring Girl was loud when she should be quiet, disruptive when she should be submissive, sexual when she should be pure, ‘masculine’ when she should be ‘feminine’. She was everything a woman was not supposed to be, and in a world before feminism, she was society’s worst nightmare.[1]
A WOMAN’S LOT
The eight Roaring Girls who feature in this book lived in Britain in the 300 years before the first wave of feminists fought tooth and nail for women’s suffrage in the late 1800s, and during those centuries, the political and cultural landscape of the country changed almost beyond recognition. Collectively, these women witnessed the final wave of the English Renaissance and the last days of the Tudors. They saw their country rent by Civil War, their monarch murdered and his son restored. They found Enlightenment with the Georgian kings and experienced Empire and industrialisation in the long reign of Victoria. Britain was transforming at an astonishing rate, yet throughout this period – though it was bookended by female rule – a woman’s legal and cultural status remained virtually stagnant. She began and ended it almost as helpless as a child.
The sweeping systemic changes needed to revolutionise a woman’s rights and opportunities may have failed to materialise by the late nineteenth century, but the first rumblings