The year's biggest fantasy trend finally gives women swords

As anyone who grew up reading Tamora Pierce can attest, the lady knight trend isn’t exactly new. Female fantasy fans have long sought ways to see themselves and their experiences reflected in the stories they love—and in ways that go beyond a simple love interest, a tortured damsel in need of rescue, or the requisite evil witch who must be vanquished. There’s a reason so many of these readers imprinted on Tolkien’s shieldmaiden Eowyn of Rohan at a young age, after all. But what makes these new takes on this genre so fascinating—and so satisfying to read—is the deliberate way they turn familiar tropes and established expectations on their heads, reframing traditional ideas of masculinity, heteronormativity, power, and propaganda along the way.

Much of our modern idea of what a knight is supposed to be and do comes from the work of Chrétien de Troyes, the 12th-century writer whose poems include “Lancelot,“ “The Knight Of The Cart,” and “Yvain, The Knight Of The Lion.” De Troyes is not only credited with introducing many of the elements we now consider essential to the King Arthur myth (Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, the search for the Holy Grail), but with defining the ideas of chivalry and courtly love in a way that still resonates centuries later. His writings were among the first to imagine chivalry—and, by extension, knighthood—as a system of ethical and moral rules, establishing those who espoused the virtues of courtesy and courtly love as protectors (and, indirectly, as weapons should the need arise). Of course, de Troyes’ stories, and the bulk of those that followed, are about male heroes and embrace a largely patriarchal view of the world. In them, though some women may initially seem powerful and influential, they are largely passive figures, particularly if you define such passivity in the simplest terms of who gets to perform action in any given story. Lots of ladies are stuck in towers, at crossroads, in far-off kingdoms, and what have you, waiting for the men to complete whatever quest or vow they’re given them to accomplish.

No one in any of this year’s lady knight books is waiting for someone else to determine or change their fate. Instead, these women are challenging norms of power, both in terms of the positions they hold and what those positions represent in the larger scheme of their societies. Knights are associated with the kind of specifically gendered power long deemed inaccessible to women and female-presenting figures, and which are often deliberately set at odds with that which is coded as overtly feminine. Many of these stories are also unabashedly queer, further breaking boundaries and reimagining classic themes and tropes in exciting and subversive new ways. 

As a result, all of these books play with gender and sexual norms in some way or other, whether by the simple act of putting women in armor, featuring central Sapphic romances, or confronting dark themes that range from colonialism to cannibalism. Several of these stories, including Tasha Suri’s The Isle In The Silver Sea, Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting, and Caitlin Starling’s The Starving Saints, also play with themes of power and propaganda, and what the idea of a lady knight can come to represent in a larger world, with or without her consent. Many of these women find themselves treated like symbols and objects as often as they are three-dimensional people, and the blurring of the lines between their various overlapping identities—think the way both history and popular culture like to envision Joan Of Arc, as simultaneously a literal saint, a pseudo-avatar for female empowerment, and a kind of gender traitor—adds a frequently bittersweet complexity to their emotional journeys as they wrestle with ideas of personhood and purpose. 

Yet, lady knight stories are also more than capable of leaning into joy in a way that many of their more male-centered counterparts are frequently not. Meagan Spooner and Amie Kaufman’s Lady’s Knight is an infectious, humor-filled romp about two medieval young women smashing the patriarchy, fighting back against classism, and falling for one another at the same time. Cait Jacobs’ charming Legally Blonde remix, The Princess Knight, purposefully rejects the idea of a Chosen One who’s not like all the other girls in favor of a girly girl heroine who loves fashion and jewelry. That she eventually learns to pick up a sword doesn’t require her to abandon her sense of self; it becomes the vehicle by which she learns self-acceptance and the depth of her inner strength. 

Yes, there’s certainly an element of escapism at work in any fantasy story, and that goes double for romantasy generally and the lady knight trend specifically. Co-opting and feminizing the idea of the knight—long a symbol of strength, independence, and even political power—feels deliciously transgressive and empowering, particularly in a time when so many real-life women are rapidly losing autonomy over many of their own choices (bodily and otherwise) or being encouraged to re-embrace traditional societal roles. In these books, female characters run the gamut when it comes to sexuality, desire, political motivations, and personal ambitions, finding ways to resist, critique, and change the world around them in unexpected ways. And if modern readers are hoping to think about ways they themselves can accomplish something similar in the real world, well, there are certainly worse role models.