“Renegade Girls” Is a Historical Graphic Novel About Queer Love—and Friendship

Nellie Bly is a name that comes up regularly when elementary schoolchildren are looking for a pioneering woman on whom to do a report. She was a journalist, we’re told, who went undercover for 10 days in a mental institution to report on the conditions there. What’s often left out is that she was also the first of a large number of female undercover journalists intending to write exposés, sometimes called “stunt girls.”

Renegade Girls: A Queer Tale of Romance and Rabble-Rousing, a new young adult graphic novel written by Nora Neus and illustrated by Julie Robine, is the story of another such stunt girl, Nell Nelson.

Little, Brown Ink

Helena (Nell) Cusick, 17 years old, has visited her aunt and uncle in New York City every summer. This year—the summer of 1888—she’s determined to stay, and not by marrying one of the dozen young, eligible men that her relatives keep throwing at her. She’s gotten a job writing society articles for the New York Chronicle and plans to make enough money to support herself. At one of the high-society parties her aunt and uncle take her to, she meets the lovely and unexpectedly sympathetic Alice Austin, who encourages Nell to pursue her dream of being a stunt-girl reporter and pitch her editor a story now instead of waiting for the perfect one.

Alice, as it turns out, is a photographer—a street photographer, a brand-new discipline. As Nell and Alice fall in love, Nell succeeds in her first reporting effort, an exposé on the terrible working conditions in a garment factory. She continues to keep her cover as a society reporter, though, and her aunt and uncle continue throwing young men at her. Will she be able to make enough to stay on her own terms? Will she be able to stay safe undercover at the other garment factories? And will she and Alice be able to stay together?

The story is written in very accessible language, with some historical turns of phrase thrown in. The other characters call Nell and Alice “gigglemugs” when they’re staring at each other with heart eyes, for example, but most of the language is more contemporary, and of course not just the words. When Alice asks whether Nell wishes to marry, Nell responds with a dirty look and a set of ellipses, and Alice’s response is “Just making sure!” It emphasizes that the young women—the young queer women—are more similar to contemporary teenagers than they are different, even if not many 17-year-olds typically go undercover at dangerous jobs anymore.

Robine’s art is very well suited to the story and the audience; as an older reader, I appreciated the detail in the clothing as well as the photographic framing of many panels. The backgrounds at Clear Comfort, Alice’s family’s farmhouse out on Staten Island, are lovely and evocative, and the contrast with the darker, drabber scenes inside the factories—still undoubtedly lighter than they were in reality—is stark.

Renegade Girls also has multiple strong and unfortunately relevant messages. For one, with the removal of LGBTQ+ history from government websites, it’s more important than ever to remember that queer folks have always been here and that even if attempts are made to erase our histories, they can’t erase our memories. For another, a second thread of the book is about working conditions in factories and child labor. Nell encounters children as young as six working, not just in the factory, and while that’s been illegal for most of a century, states including Florida and Iowa are attempting to roll back all the laws against child labor. There is a reason that child labor was outlawed, and a big part of that is that it is dangerous to have children doing jobs better done by adults. The book shows some of those dangers.

A third story thread is Nell’s desire to be financially independent and to work outside of the home. The upper-class women in the book disdain this, but of course, working-class women have always worked outside of the home. In an era when it seems we’re getting closer and closer to women being shoved back into the kitchen against our wills, Nell’s fight feels a little too relevant.

One might guess that, as queer women in the late 1800s, Nell and Alice would be isolated from their peers, but in fact, that’s very much not the case. Nell, who is only in New York in the summers, is still great friends with Lucia, one of the kitchen workers; she also seems to be on good terms with the rest of the staff. Alice has a whole group of friends out on Staten Island. All of these people know that Nell and Alice are queer, and they not only accept it but rejoice in it. The bonds of friendship, especially with other women, are very strong in this story.

One of the most interesting parts of the story for me is the afterword. Helena Cusick (Nell Nelson) was a real person: She was a schoolteacher, not shoehorned into a society role, and she also went undercover in Chicago—work that helped change the laws around worker’s rights in Illinois. Though there is no evidence that the historical Nell was queer, there isn’t much, if any, evidence that she wasn’t. As the author notes, “artists and authors have invented straight romances for historical figures for centuries.”

Alice Austen was a real person, as well, and her photography is real. Unlike Nell, she was well known to be queer and lived openly with her partner, Gertrude Tate, for more than 50 years. As the first woman on Staten Island to own a car, she held her independence to be paramount, and her house is now a National LGBT Historic Site.

Given how much historical fiction we have about the heterosexual relationships, real or imagined, of various folks, it’s about time we have more historical fiction about imagined, plausible queer relationships.

Renegade Girls: A Queer Tale of Romance and Rabble-Rousing, written by Nora Neus and illustrated by Julie Robine, is available now.