Love & Rage: Writing Strong Girls and Women – Natasha Hastings

Learning to Portray Strong Girls and Women

I’ve been keeping a secret ever since I started writing The Sea Queen, the second book in my magical-historical trilogy, The Miraculous Sweetmakers.

The secret is this: out of anything I’ve ever written, The Sea Queen was the story I was most anxious about telling, because I knew how important it was to get it right.

While writing this trilogy, I’ve constantly thought about what it means to be a strong girl and woman, and how to portray them. The Miraculous Sweetmakers is set during the late seventeenth century, when fantastical worlds glittered in the wings. Despite this setting, however, I believe the lessons we can learn about strength from any era are timeless.

Love and Rage

Writing The Sea Queen meant I had to examine my own understanding of strength. For me, it is a double-sided coin: a bright, powerful combination of love and rage.

To love, whether as a child or an adult, is to allow yourself to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable means you could end up being hurt by losing who or what you love. Thomasina and Anne, my two main characters in The Miraculous Sweetmakers, experience love in different ways. Thomasina grieves for her brother, Arthur, and spent years caring for her mother. She loves sweetmaking, but her talents aren’t taken seriously by her father. Meanwhile, Anne struggles with a sense of duty, having turned her back on her parents’ business to pursue the career she wants, and has a passion for entrepreneurship and science. Despite adversity – both magical and non-magical – the girls form a close friendship and forge a new path together. By deciding to love, they grow strong both as individuals and as a duo.

The other edge of my ‘strength coin’ – rage – can, for some, feel stressful as a concept. But for me, righteous rage – when channelled in a healthy way – can feel more like a balm than something to be feared. It can be a promise of change.

Countering Misogyny 

The Sea Queen is being published at a time when misogyny festers throughout the UK and the world. Girls and women are expected to swallow everyday injustices, all while hearing story after terrible story of real, awful things that have happened to strangers as well as people they know.

Since my own girlhood, I have turned time and time again to books featuring rage, as I find them comforting. Two of my favourite novels are Anne of Green Gables (who can forget the moment Anne decides to hit Gilbert Blythe over the head with a slate? I am NOT recommending this activity, or indeed any violence as a conflict resolution device, but it’s great to read about), and A Pocketful of Stars by Aisha Bushby, a book that explores challenging mother-daughter dynamics as well as powerful feelings arising from grief.

Swirling at the centre of The Sea Queen is the enemy of Thomasina and Anne – the Sea Queen herself: a magical being bursting with enchantment and incandescent with rage, causing magical destruction and chaos. She is feared. She is hated. She is a manifestation of what I feel many girls and women possibly want to be sometimes: powerful, untouchable, and – seemingly – unbeatable. The Sea Queen acts exactly how she wants to, regardless of the consequences, and burns with a terrible, all-consuming magic.

Battling With Courage 

She, Thomasina, and Anne form that strange, double-sided coin of strength in different ways as they battle against one another. The two girls are alight with love and rage as they use all their courage and cunning to try and work out how to defeat the most wicked, powerful being they have ever encountered.

But what they learn might be the most terrible, timeless truth of all: that perhaps the Sea Queen was once just like them.