'My book finally mirrors their real lives' Just after it had been published, a child wrote to me to ask when Bertie and his boyfriend were going to get married, and I knew I must have done something right: their letter simply assumed that the characters in my book would behave like the people they knew about in real life. Bertie, Daisy’s brother, is in a gay relationship in Mistletoe and Murder. Some of the suspects in Jolly Foul Play are lesbians. So I kept going, working to tell stories about LGBTQ+ as well as straight characters. When I wrote Murder Most Unladylike in 2010, even hinting at Miss Bell’s bisexuality felt transgressive, but I wrote it (in a children’s book! A LGBTQ+ person in a children’s book!) and the world didn’t cave in. Old habits die hard, and even when you know the rules you’ve been taught are wrong, it’s difficult to push past the invisible barrier in your head.

It’s taken me a long time to really understand why my friends and I were lied to ( Section 28, one of the coldest, wickedest laws to have been passed in the UK in the last 50 years), and even longer to decide what to do about it.

That day I began to realise that all of the rules I’d learned about who could be in books, and what books could be about, were wrong. It took me until I read my first Sarah Waters book, aged 13, to discover (with a sense of utter astonishment) that you were allowed to write stories where girls fell in love with each other. In real life, there were also gay people, while in books the concept had apparently not been invented. In my real life, after all, I went to school with children who were Black, East Asian and South Asian, while everyone in school stories had blond hair and blue eyes. All of the rules were wrongĪs a child, I realised quite early on that people in books must operate on quite different rules to the people I met in real life. She had her start in the self-centred, sharp-tongued Gwendolen Chant from Charmed Life, the vain Gwendoline Lacy from Malory Towers (there are a lot of Gwendolen/ines in Daisy’s DNA), spirited Nancy from Swallows and Amazons and Susan from Narnia, who shouldn’t have had to give up adventuring just because she discovered fashion.īut there’s one way in which she differs from each of these characters – and, in fact, every character I ever came across in children’s books when I was growing up: Daisy is a girl who falls in love with other girls. In some ways, it’s easy to say where my character Daisy Wells came from. Here's why it is so important that books like hers celebrate LGBTQ+ characters in children's books. Robin Stevens' incredibly successful middle grade series has always aimed to mirror real life and the diverse world around us. Robin Stevens, author of Murder Most Unladylike, on how her main character Daisy is coming out as gay

Robin stevens new book