Who are your favorite heroines? Perhaps you can easily name some from your reading. Today, YA books are starting to include people of all shapes and sizes as the heroes of their own books. However, when I was growing up, most of the books I read didn’t have women as main characters.
And then one day I came across Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, starring Lyra Belacqua. Suddenly, I realised how few heroines I had come across in my reading. Happily, Lyra was the perfect introduction: a forceful, quick-witted, deceitful, proud heroine at the centre of her own story.
I was completely enchanted by Lyra. In the first book, Northern Lights, someone says “you cannot change what you are, only what you do.” Throughout the trilogy, Lyra never apologises for being a girl, refusing to let her gender define her. While Lyra does face down people – and bears – who think that being a girl somehow makes her weaker, she never believes them. Instead, Lyra proves them wrong and goes on fantastic adventures into other worlds.
Lyra is fearless and reckless, and she became the inspiration for my character Leylah in my new book Rebecca Newton and the Sacred Flame. Leylah doesn’t want to let other people decide her life choices for her. So she breaks the rules, and sets off on world-saving adventures.
But it’s hard to save the world on your own. You definitely need friends, and sometimes a cute boy or girl. Lyra trusts and needs her friends, especially her daemon companion Pantalaimon. Pan, as he is also known, is one of the most charming side-kicks in literature, changing from a mouse to a pine marten to a dragon, depending on his mood! And then there is Will, a boy from another world who falls in love with Lyra. And while I won’t tell you what happens, there is a beautiful love story in the second and third books.
However, Pullman never stops writing fantasy adventure. Just because Lyra is a girl doesn’t mean that romance is the most important thing in her life, or that love makes her weak. Instead, love becomes strength for Lyra, and she can depend on Will to help her in her adventures saving multiple universes.
In The Amber Spyglass, the last book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman wrote a line that I always read when I need inspiration: “Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.”
Lyra’s story, even if it is set in an Oxford that is not really our Oxford, is still true. Truth is how real Lyra seems when you are reading her story. Truth is how you feel when reading the books. Truth is that girls are heroines, and need their stories just as much as boys. For these reasons, I want to keep telling stories about Leylah and her friends. I want to tell the truth – in a story.
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Mario Routi’s latest book is Rebecca Newton and the Sacred Flame, which is available on the Guardian website.
