A thousand embroidery hoops, T-shirts and posters on Etsy regularly remind us that well-behaved women rarely make history. On the British High Street and in daily life, by contrast, little girls are assailed by messages telling them to sparkle, be kind and smile. So how do girls learn to stop sparkling and start behaving badly? They find role models; in music, in their friendship circles, on the big and small screen and between the pages of their favourite books.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden featured one such role model. An audaciously rude girl called Mary Lennox who, we learn, by six years old was “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived”. Young readers, and the grown-ups they became, have long been enchanted by Mary’s evolution from brat to heroine and the healing powers of the hidden garden she seeks refuge in, which changes the lives of everyone who enters.