Beyond the Costume: Building Women Who Resist History’s Expectations

Historical fiction is often introduced through its visible details: clothing, food, architecture, weapons, streets, rooms, and the changing shape of a familiar landscape. Those details matter. They give a story weight. But they are not the story’s deepest source of tension.

The more difficult question is this: what did a particular woman have to become in order to survive her world—and what might it cost her to refuse?

That question sits at the heart of historical sapphic fiction. Women in the past were never simply passive figures waiting for modern readers to discover them. They worked, argued, desired, endured, negotiated, disobeyed, protected one another, and made choices within systems that were often designed to limit them. Writing them convincingly means taking both sides of that reality seriously: the restrictions were real, and so was women’s resistance to them.

Start with the role, not just the rebellion

A character’s defiance has more force when we understand the expectation pressing against her.

“Independent” is too broad a description to build a person around. Independent in what way? Financially? Socially? Sexually? Militarily? Spiritually? A woman might be permitted authority in one part of her life while being carefully controlled in another. She might have room to make decisions at work but none within her family. She might be trusted in a crisis and still denied the right to shape her own future.

The historical role assigned to a character should therefore be specific. So should the refusal.

In The Woman Who Refused Rome, Brenna and Eira belong to an Iron Age Britain shaped by conflict with Rome. Their story is not only about opposing an empire. It is also about the expectations placed upon two women inside their own communities, and about what becomes possible when those expectations are questioned.

In Wanting Her While London Burned, Nell Carter and Dr. Beatrice Whitmore move through a different kind of pressure: London during the Blitz, where public duty, danger, class, and personal feeling collide. A woman’s work may make her indispensable without making her free. Responsibility can be both a source of purpose and a cage.

The setting changes. The questions remain recognizable.

Let the world push back

A historical character should not feel as though she has been dropped into the past without consequence. The period needs to shape the choices available to her.

That does not mean every character must agree with the rules of her society. It means the rules should have visible effects. They should influence what she risks, what she hides, whom she trusts, and how she understands herself.

If a character crosses a boundary, the story should know that it is a boundary. Perhaps the danger is public disgrace. Perhaps it is economic dependence, professional ruin, family rejection, physical violence, or the loss of someone’s protection. Sometimes the consequence is less dramatic but just as powerful: a narrowed future, a reputation that cannot be repaired, or the constant exhaustion of having to explain one’s right to exist in a particular space.

Resistance becomes more compelling when it is not effortless. A woman who refuses a role may still need to use the language of that role to protect herself. She may accept one compromise in order to preserve the possibility of another choice later. She may not see herself as brave at all. She may simply recognize that obedience has become more dangerous than disobedience.

Desire should complicate the decision

In sapphic historical fiction, romance should not be a decorative escape from the period. It should bring the period’s pressures into sharper focus.

What does it mean for two women to want one another when their society offers them few accepted ways to name that desire? What can they ask of each other when safety may depend on secrecy? Does love make rebellion easier, or does it create another person to lose?

These questions do not require every historical romance to become bleak. Tenderness can be defiant. So can humor, care, companionship, and the simple act of imagining a future that the surrounding world has not offered.

But the relationship should still belong to its setting. The lovers need not share the same understanding of freedom. One may be more willing to take visible risks; the other may have learned that survival depends on caution. One may want a life beyond the boundaries of her role; the other may want to transform those boundaries from within. Desire does not erase those differences. It reveals them.

Give resistance more than one shape

The loudest form of rebellion is not always the most meaningful.

A woman can resist by refusing an order, but she can also resist by preserving forbidden knowledge, choosing her own work, protecting another woman, withholding information, building a private network, or declining to become cruel in a world that rewards cruelty. Historical records often preserve the actions of powerful men more clearly than the everyday decisions of women. Fiction can explore the spaces those records leave behind without pretending that every silence has a simple explanation.

This is where character and worldbuilding meet. A character’s choices should emerge from her circumstances, abilities, fears, and relationships—not from the author’s desire to make her seem modern.

The goal is not to create a woman who speaks with twenty-first-century certainty in an earlier century. The goal is to create a woman who understands her own world, recognizes its limits, and finds the edges where those limits can be tested.

History gives the pressure; characters give it meaning

Research can tell us what institutions existed, what work was available, how people travelled, what dangers were common, and which forms of power shaped daily life. Characterization asks what those facts felt like from inside one woman’s body and mind.

That is the part of historical fiction I return to most often: not the fantasy of escaping into the past, but the effort to understand how a person might claim a life within conditions she did not choose.

Brenna and Eira, Nell and Beatrice, belong to different worlds. Their stories are shaped by different histories and different forms of danger. Yet each begins with a woman confronting the distance between the role assigned to her and the life she wants.

That distance is where a story can begin.

And sometimes, if the character is stubborn enough, it is where history begins to move.