11 Historical Novels About Women Misbehaving and Making History

I found my history classes in school to be mind-numbingly dull: just memorization of dates and battles, kings and presidents. Conspicuously missing from the pages of my textbooks were women. To make up for this, I turned to novels, where I found heroines who too often were tormented, passive, wringing their hands over a man. Or they were witches, victims. Few of the heroines rebelled, and when they did, they suffered. Most of these tales were authored by men, written as though the women in them deserved their fates.