There’s something delicious about writing fictional women who buck the rules of their time—especially when real women were already doing it first.
Meet Annette Kellerman, Australia’s original rule-breaking mermaid. In the early 1900s, Kellerman wasn’t content with swimming laps in a socially acceptable woolen curtain. No, she took one look at the sea of corseted beachgoers and decided “Nope.” She designed a sleek, scandalous one-piece swimsuit, dove into the waves, and swam circles around societal norms, and, incidentally, most of the men competing against her.
She was arrested for wearing that swimsuit on a Boston beach, and the headlines roared. But the real splash? The judge let her wear it, as long as she wore a cape over it until she reached the waterline. The woman had literally rewritten the dress code with one stroke.
If she sounds familiar, that’s because I channeled a lot of Kellerman’s boldness into Adelaide Becket, particularly in The Indecent Agent—book 7 in the Adelaide Becket series. Adelaide’s own “scandalous” bathing moment on a South African beach, complete with horrified beachgoers and pearl-clutching constables, was pulled directly from Kellerman’s real-life arrest. Kellerman’s story leapt off the page at me—and into my fiction.
But Annette Kellerman didn’t stop at swimsuits.
She swam the Seine, nearly conquered the English Channel (three times), and starred in silent films doing her own death-defying stunts—once diving 90 feet into the sea. She became the first woman to appear nude in a major motion picture (A Daughter of the Gods, 1916) and inspired future generations of mermaid stars, including Esther Williams, who later portrayed her in Million Dollar Mermaid.
Kellerman also became a businesswoman, health advocate, author, vaudeville star, and one of the first women to popularize synchronized swimming. Oh—and in a time when Harvard was literally trying to measure women against Greek statues, she was declared “The Perfect Woman.” Her response? “But only from the neck down.”
My kind of woman.
There’s a certain thrill in reclaiming forgotten heroines and letting them echo through fiction. When I needed a way for Adelaide to rattle cages without firing a single shot, I gave her a Kellerman bathing suit and pointed her toward the beach. History took care of the rest.
If you want to see how Adelaide channels Annette’s fearless flair for “indecency,” you can find The Indecent Agent here.
Here’s to women who wear what they damn well please—and dive headfirst into history while doing it.
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