Collection Connections: 'Fair Rosaline' by Natasha Solomons

In Romeo and Juliet, Rosaline is never staged. Nevertheless, we learn that she has rejected Romeo’s affections, chosen chastity, and become the object of his frustrated desire. Rosaline’s absence from the play leaves open the possibility that she is empowered precisely because we can imagine that she chose her own path.

Natasha Solomons’s Fair Rosaline disrupts this assumption. Re-contextualising the play through the lens of Romeo’s unknowable ex-love, Solomons transforms an iconic love story into an anti-romance. Fair Rosaline is a novel about girlhood, instability, sexual violence, patriarchal control, mental health, and the possibility of resistance. Like other revisionist adaptations of its kind, the novel engages with feminist questions while exploring the narrative of struggle that so often frames explorations of girlhood, prompting the question: does girls’ cultural value come at the cost of their suffering?

Girl characters have a long history within Shakespearean reception. For centuries readers, writers, and artists have expanded upon Shakespeare’s fragmentary characters to articulate ideas about the transition to womanhood. The 19th century played a particularly pivotal role in this process. Works such as Anna Jameson’s Characteristics of Women and Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines contributed to a burgeoning cultural interest in Shakespeare’s girls, transforming them into figures through which socio-cultural discourses could be mediated. In particular, Girlhood provides an important genealogy for contemporary Young Adult adaptations. Rather than accepting that Shakespeare’s women only exist within the world of the play, Cowden Clarke invents their childhoods, providing them with histories and psychologies that contextualise who they become. This establishes a model that Fair Rosaline develops.

One must, however, exercise caution when discussing Shakespearean girlhood. The term “girl” was only beginning to acquire its gendered meaning when Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet, and early modern ideas of youth resist direct associations with modern adolescence.

Nevertheless, age is important to Romeo and Juliet. We are repeatedly reminded that Juliet is thirteen, years younger than the sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old girl of Shakespeare’s sources. But thirteen did not necessarily signify childhood to an early modern audience. Twelve to fourteen was understood as a period of physical and sexual maturity, even as it remained considerably younger than the average marital age. Juliet therefore occupies a liminal position between child and prospective wife.

In Fair Rosaline, Rosaline is also positioned at the threshold of womanhood: her father gives her twelve days before she is sent to a convent, which she understands as a kind of ‘living death’. Those twelve days become an intensified adolescence – a period between childhood and adulthood, freedom and confinement – from which Rosaline begins to rebel. Comparatively, Juliet becomes increasingly childlike; chewing her plaits, vulnerable, and in need of protection. The rebellious qualities that Shakespeare gives Juliet in resisting her parents and choosing death over a future she does not want are redistributed to Rosaline.

This redistribution reflects how Solomons pieces Rosaline together from fragments of other Shakespearean women. With these fragments, the composite Rosaline also inherits the suffering of Shakespeare’s women. Yet merging their experiences serves a narrative purpose, de-glamorising Romeo and Juliet by surfacing harsh realities that lurk beneath the play’s romantic narratives. For Rosaline, it also establishes a tension between empowerment and suffering.

Suffering has often been treated as part of what makes a girl compelling. This notion has been traced through what Sally Mitchell terms the ‘wound of adolescence’: a 19^th-century literary device which frames the transition to womanhood as a period of crisis, vulnerability, and suffering. Building on this idea in her genealogy of the girl, Catherine Driscoll describes difficult adolescence as a kind of universal trauma, while Leslie Jamison has written about the cultural appeal of the wound itself (‘wound appeal’).

Shakespearean visual culture frequently perpetuates this idea. 19th-century representations of Shakespeare’s heroines transformed female suffering into something beautiful. John William Wright’s Lavinia (fig.2) offers an especially revealing example. Here, the brutality of Lavinia’s mutilation is sanitized, leaving only a quietly suffering girl who is made beautiful in her pain. Unlike representations that aestheticize the moment of death, Lavinia makes suffering itself the subject of the image. Similarly, contemporary digital representations of Juliet (fig.3) stage suffering on the female body. Images of grieving figures, fragmented bodies, bejeweled blood stains, and ornate daggers turn Juliet’s violent death into an aesthetic commodity. Across these representations, suffering does more than signify tragedy: it helps produce the cultural image of the girl herself, making vulnerability aesthetically and emotionally compelling.

Fair Rosaline both participates in and challenges this tradition.

Rosaline suffers grief, isolation, sexual coercion, manipulation, and mental distress. Yet her suffering does not prompt passivity. She refuses to remain what we may term the “sad girl” – a familiar cultural figure in which melancholy, mental illness, toxic relationships, and self-destruction become part of an aesthetic identity.

Where Juliet becomes associated with self-harm and the desire to die for Romeo, Rosaline resists. Through her lens Juliet’s wounds become ugly – ‘crimson scratches’ and a ‘rusted blade’ – rather than aesthetic commodities. Meanwhile, Romeo becomes almost a parallel for depression, blighting girls ‘with thoughts of death and self-injury’. Juliet’s wounds, Rosaline declares, were caused by him; products of a violent patriarchal world.

For Rosaline, this violence sparks female rage. ‘Resentment’, ‘rage’, and ‘anger’ rise through her. Even her physical expressions of distress (biting her lip, digging her nails into her palm) become manifestations of contained fury.

This fury prompts action. Resisting her father, Rosaline cross-dresses and temporarily escapes the social expectations attached to being a girl. Eventually she also exposes Romeo and the Friar, fights the patriarchal structures that have constrained her, and works to free and avenge the girls who could not save themselves.

Yet resistance has long been associated with Juliet. Contemporary examples (e.g., fig.4) foreground Juliet’s own agency in fighting for her chosen future. This surfaces a duality within her character: she is both tragic and determined to rebel. By emphasizing Juliet’s youth and re-centering the play’s perspective, Solomons transfers this energy to Rosaline.

Rather than a direct transference of agency from one heroine to another, Solomons invites us to reconsider Romeo and Juliet through a modern understanding of adolescence. Contemporary adaptations such as Franco Zeffirelli’s (1968) and Baz Luhrmann’s (1996) often soften Juliet’s textual age, depicting her as a young woman in her mid-to-late teens. Though still young, this alters how modern audiences perceive the character. This is particularly significant given the play’s continued prominence in school curricula, where Juliet emerges as a figure through whom young girls understand romantic love. Within this culture, Juliet can become a kind of patron saint of teenage love, which her cultural value bound up with her tragic circumstances. Not all recognise the impact of her age as the above Pinterest user does when (albeit through the tweet of Jayden Smith), they stress: “[Juliet is] 13 This Is Ridiculous”.

Thus, Solomons’s reconsideration of Juliet’s age complicates not only the gendered power dynamics of the play but also its position as a romantic cultural touchstone. By framing her youth through a modern lens and making her child status more visible, Fair Rosaline challenges the fetishisation of young love and death that has persisted from 19th-century representations into contemporary culture.

However, this does not entirely resolve the tension in question here: suffering remains a source of female empowerment for Rosaline. By the end of the novel, she has escaped Romeo, resisted her father, saved Juliet, and avoided the tragic ending Shakespeare gives so many of his heroines. Yet her empowered position remains closely connected to the suffering she has experience. Moreover, her return to the convent suggests she has not entirely escaped the structures that produced her suffering.

Driscoll argues that girlhood is represented as a process of bodily and spatial containment. Rosaline escapes the bodily forms often imposed on Shakespeare’s women through marriage or death, but her adolescence nevertheless culminates in spatial restriction. However, the convent – initially imagined as a ‘living death’ – becomes more ambiguous: a feminine space in which she can write, preserve histories, and exercise agency.

Rather than resolving the tension between suffering and empowerment, Solomons reimagines the consequences of agency. Rosaline does not fully escape the ‘wound of adolescence’, but unlike Juliet, her resistance makes another future possible.