ABSTRACT
What little critical consideration there is of Bessie Marchant’s World War I fiction for girls reads the four novels, Molly Angel’s Adventures (1915), A Girl Munition Worker (1916), A VAD in Salonika (1917), and A Transport Girl in France (1919), as demonstrating new opportunities afforded women by the war’s social upheaval. This, however, reveals a lack of familiarity with Marchant’s late Victorian and Edwardian empire adventures for girls. Marchant’s heroines are British girls in various outposts of the empire who find themselves helping incapable or incapacitated fathers, or rescuing eligible young men, by breaking with the conventions of domestic femininity. There is some lip service paid to the latter, but often the most traditionally feminine girls in Marchant’s novels are subverted. The heroines who take on traditionally masculine roles are by contrast celebrated for their grit. This article examines female agency in Marchant’s World War I fiction against her empire adventure stories, including earlier ones such as Juliet the Mail Carrier (1907) and ones published during the war years, such as The Gold-Marked Charm (1915). Rather than a departure from earlier girls’ adventure fiction, the World War I novels are an extension of the empire adventure.
