The best historical fiction with wanton & wilful women

It’s so rare that I read a novel and it instantly joins my all-time top five, but that’s what happened the second I finished The Crimson Petal and the White. Michel’s Faber’s 864-page epic tale starring shrewd, intelligent, and utterly convincing 1870s prostitute Sugar is rich with period detail and psychological insight, and apparently took him 20 years to write. Spoiler: it was worth it. Not only are Sugar, her flawed perfumier lover William Rackham and his troubled wife Agnes sensitively and credibly portrayed, Faber’s world of Victorian London throbs with life (and death). If you love complex characters, vivid atmosphere, exquisite writing, and truly daring plot and structural twists, you’ll adore Crimson Petal. 

Defoe’s other novels are often overshadowed by his most famous, Robinson Crusoe, but most are absolute romps, and Moll Flanders is no exception. Narrator Moll is bumptious, buxom, and completely beguiling as a protagonist who just won’t quit: from an inauspicious start in life (born to a convicted felon in Newgate, the worst prison in London), she sets out to make her fortune – and has a series of remarkable adventures along the way. At first it’s the old tale of master-seduces-maid – but Moll’s much too chipper and clever to let being a “fallen woman” dent her ambition, and vigorously pursues prosperity, collecting five husbands, ten kids, and a successful criminal career of her own along the way. When she’s finally caught thieving and thrown into Newgate (just like her mum) all seems lost – but at 63, having survived much longer than most wanton women in fiction, Defoe gives her a well-deserved happy ending. 

Famously, Thackeray subtitled his most celebrated work “a novel without a hero” – and frankly, that’s a major reason readers love it and it’s lasted so long. His anti-heroine Becky Sharp is even more notable for her wit, keen intelligence, and moral flexibility than for her personal attractions, and despite lacking both wealth and high birth, claws her way up the Georgian social ladder with scant regard for convention or other people’s feelings. Becky’s that rarity of (male-authored) nineteenth-century fiction: a female protagonist who’s fully-realised, three-dimensional, fascinating, and flawed – about as far from Dickens’s simpering tweens and caricatured crones as it’s possible to get. Through the Napoleonic wars, scandal, and ruin, we root for Becky even as we judge her: will she survive, even thrive? Read on!

I wanted to punch the air when I first read this book! Wilkie Collins is massively overlooked compared to Dickens (one of his closest friends), as well as infinitely better at writing believable characters, especially women. Often, his plots are far superior too. Marianne Halcombe, arguably the co-protagonist of The Woman in White (after painter Walter Hartright), and certainly the most memorable character, is no wanton – but she’s compellingly strong-willed, defying convention, social expectation, and strong opposition to protect her half-sister Laura. Marianne knows her mind, and her own worth: she’s smart, self-possessed, and physically daring too, even climbing out on a roof to spy on the villainous Count Fosco. No wonder critic John Sutherland called her "one of the finest creations in all Victorian fiction"!

Angela Carter is famous for her sumptuous language, structural playfulness, genre-bending, and seductive, logic-defying plots – and if you like gorgeous lyricism, unforgettable characters, and magical realism (emphasis on the magical), you’ll fall in love with Nights at the Circus. In 1899, journalist Jack Walser meets six-foot-two circus aerialist Fevvers, “the Cockney Venus”. Raised in a brothel and a graduate of freak shows, she’s now a star of the Victorian stage – but are her wings real, as she claims? Walser becomes part of the circus in body and spirit, as, disguised as a clown, he follows Fevvers to St Petersburg and into the wilds of Siberia, where Fevvers must draw on all her cunning and strength to survive – let alone save Walser, too.