The Case Against Modernizing Classic Heroines

In today’s retellings of classic stories, it’s become almost reflexive to modernize the female lead, even if the time in which it’s set is still long ago. She’s sharp-tongued, rebellious, often hilariously jaded. She kicks off her corset and calls out the patriarchy before breakfast. These updates can be bold, witty, and enjoyable—but they can also feel more like commentary than character.

There’s something equally powerful—and arguably more haunting—about a heroine who remains true to the world she inhabits. A woman shaped by the rules, silences, and subterranean powers of her time.

Novels like Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly and my own Mademoiselle Frankenstein take this quieter, stranger path. Instead of projecting modern values backward, they sink fully into the historical moment, illuminating how a woman might survive, suffer, and shape her fate within it. Writing this way demands more than historical research—it asks for emotional archaeology.

Why Are So Many Heroines Modernized?

The urge is understandable. Many original classics relegated women to decorative or doomed roles—muses, victims, love objects. Modern retellings often respond by giving these women swords, snark, and agency in neon lights. Take Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, where Elizabeth Bennet is reimagined as a martial arts assassin. Or any number of Gothic retellings where a once-quiet governess becomes a storm-chasing rebel.

These transformations may feel empowering, but they often impose 21st-century ideals onto characters who would never have spoken or thought that way. The risk? Losing the texture and tension of historical reality—the ache of constrained lives, the power of quiet endurance, the significance of subtle resistance.

Writing a Woman of Her Time

In Mademoiselle Frankenstein, I wrote Océane as a woman of the late 18th century—not a modern mind in a historical costume. She’s bright and bold, but her power lives in intellect, adaptation, and survival within limitations. Like Mary Reilly, whose every thought is shaped by the rigid Victorian order around her, Océane navigates grief, desire, and forbidden creation within a world that constantly tells her “no.”

Her strength is not spectacle. It’s persistence and quiet obsession. It’s refusal.

The Power of Romantic Emotionality

One great casualty of modernization is emotional depth. Romantic heroines felt profoundly: love could shatter them; loss could alter the landscape of their souls. They were allowed to be overwhelmed. To be irrational. To scream or faint or love someone forever after a single glance. In today’s retellings, emotion is often filtered through irony—characters cope with grief by cracking jokes, deflecting sincerity with cleverness.

But in Romantic literature, passion is power. Emotion is not something to be escaped—it is the engine of transformation. To write a woman of the past is to let her feel—without apology. She weeps, not because she’s weak, but because what she’s lost cannot be replaced.

Why It Matters

When we write women true to their time, we honor the ingenuity it took to live under constraint. These heroines do not need to be modernized to be powerful. Their very survival, however long, is subversive. Their agency, however limited, lies in their choices and in their longings, however unfulfilled. And in the echo of their emotional truth, which still haunts us.

There is nothing weak about a heroine who endures.