Literature / Girls of Many Lands

L to R: Minuk, Neela, Spring Pearl, Leyla, Saba, Cécile, Isabel.

The Girls of Many Lands line are a Spiritual Successor extension of the American Girl brand.

While the American Girl line focused only on United States history through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, the Girls of Many Lands focused on older girls of about twelve years old from various eras and cultures around the world. The books were aimed at an older demographic, and so covered more dark and controversial topics compared to the lighter-toned American Girl brand.

The line had 9" dolls designed by toy designer Helen Kish; unlike the American Girl dolls, they were put in elaborate outfits that were not intended to be removed and the dolls were intended to be more as display pieces. The line launched with four of the characters (Cécile, Minuk, Spring Pearl, and Neela) and added the other three (Saba, Leyla, and Kathleen) soon after; it lasted from 2002 to 2005 before being discontinued.

See also WellieWishers, another spinoff brand but aimed at a younger demographic.

Works and characters in the Girls of Many Lands series:

• Isabel: Taking Wing: Isabel Campion, covering Tudor England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1592)
• Cécile: Gates of Gold: Cécile Revel, covering France during the last years of the court of Sun King Louis XIV of France (1711)
• Leyla: The Black Tulip: Leyla, covering the Tulip Period in Türkiye (1720)
• Saba: Under the Hyena's Foot: Saba, covering Ethiopia during the Age of Judges (1846)
• Spring Pearl: The Last Flower: Chou Spring Pearl, covering China during the Second Opium War (1857)
• Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway: Minuk, covering the arrival of American Christian missionaries in the Alaskan Territory (1890)
• Kathleen: The Celtic Knot: Kathleen Murphy, covering Ireland during the Irish Great Depression (1937)
• Neela: Victory Song: Neela Sen, covering the rise of Indian resistance near the end of The Raj (1939)

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The Girl of Many Lands franchise provides examples of:

• Arranged Marriage:
  • Neela: Victory Song begins with Neela's sister Usha being married off in an arranged match. Before the wedding, Usha expresses anxiety because she barely knows her husband-to-be, fearing he might come to dislike her once he knows her better.
  • In Layla: The Black Tulip, Layla learns that the Turkish elites practice arranged marriages and that some girls are even married off as literal children (although the marriages are purely contractual until the girl is of a proper age; it's basically just getting the legalities out of the way early). Princess Fatma was married for the first time at age five and widowed at seven without ever even meeting her husband.
• Artistic License – History:
  • The Alaska Native Knowledge Network found multiple errors in Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway, to the point it isn't recommended as an accurate portrayal of the lives of the Yup'ik. Even the ritual that provides the title is wrong; a Yup'ik elder consulted said the Yup'ik "do not just spread ashes anywhere, especially in the pathway," and furthermore knowledge of their cultural rites is sacred and wouldn't have been openly shared with people outside of it.
  • The reason Spring Pearl has unbound feet is because her late mother experienced so much pain from her own foot-binding that she vowed she'd never do the same to her own offspring. This would have been an exceptionally radical position to take at the time, but few of the characters in the story seem to recognize this; while they know it's abnormal, it's discussed as if it was just an unusual fashion choice rather than a shockingly extreme decision, which is what deciding not to bind a girl's feet within the cultural context of the time would have been.^note While there were some Chinese who didn't practice foot-binding, most of those cases were within cultural minorities that never adopted the practice in the first place (as is the case for Spring Pearl's foster sisters, who have unbound feet themselves because they have Hakka ancestry and the Hakka didn't practice foot-binding); for a woman raised in the foot-binding culture to just decide on her own to buck that cultural custom was basically unheard of.
• Been There, Shaped History: Cécile bonds with the two young dukes—the great grandsons of the Sun King—and is one of the people who bars herself in a room away from the court doctors with Madame de Ventadour so they don't have the chance to bleed Anjou, the youngest, to try and cure his measles fever. Cécile spends the night holding Anjou against her, and is the one to inform Madame de Ventadour that his fever has broken. She's exiled from court for her actions—someone had to be—but offered a chance to attend St. Cyr by Madame de Maintenon. "Anjou" grows up to succeed his great grandfather at the age of five (as his father, mother, and older brother all died in part from the bloodletting) as Louis XV.
• Blue Blood: Madame, sister in law of the King, says that Cécile's late mother had noble blood in order to give her a position on the Sun King's court even though she's a peasant. Madame de Maintenon, mistress of the king, thinks this is a lie but doesn't argue with it, only warning Cécile against committing treason. Cécile later learns this is true; her mother was from a fallen noble family and marrying Cecile's father was below her station but the best she could do, and Cécile was born while they were at court. They never told her since they were exiled when she was only two or so and could never return. Cécile's nobility helps earn her a place at St. Cyr along with Madame de Maintenon's recommendation after her own banishment from court.
• Court Physician: Dr. Fagon, serving on the court of the Sun King. He is a proponent of bloodletting, which was in opposition to Cécile's father. Her father had been the second physician but when he was defiant at court regarding the care of Madame's husband—he fought Dr. Fagon on bleeding the Duke a third time—he was exiled from court never to return. Dr. Fagon bleeds both the prince, princess, and the young prince Bretagne when they contract measles, which accelerates their deaths; Anjou, who is kept away from bleeding, survives.
• Curtain Clothing: In Kathleen: The Celtic Knot, Kathleen's family can't afford to buy fabric to make her an Irish dancing costume to perform in, so her aunt uses the fabric from a pair of green curtains.
• Darker and Edgier: The Girls of Many Lands books had darker plots than the Historical Character books. The series has older protagonists than the historical characters, and covers darker and sadder topics and and more controversial eras of history around the world that the American Girl series tends to play down. Furthermore, not all the stories come to a pleasant ending the way most Historical Characters have happen; there's a chance that everything in fact, does not work out for the ultimate best even if things may look up for the main character.
• Death of a Child:
  • On the way back to Versailles—in a rush since the Sun King wants to be back in time for a council meeting—the king's stagecoach runs over two peasant children who were in the road during a rainstorm. The families are given coins in compensation, but Cécile is quietly horrified at the idea that the king thinks the lives of two children could be paid off for any amount at all—and that the drivers blamed the parents for not watching their children when they were likely busy working to pay the taxes to the King.
  • Along with his parents the Duke of Burgundy and Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, five-year-old Bretagne dies due to bloodletting after he catches measles. His younger brother Anjou survives when Cécile and Madame de Ventadour barricade themselves in a room preventing Dr. Fagon and the court doctors from bleeding him as his brother was.
  • It's briefly mentioned that Isabel's aunt de Vere had five children who all died within hours of their births.
• Decadent Court: Truth in Television for the Sun King's Court, and Cécile experiences a lot of it firsthand. She starts to realize this on the way to Versailles twice, before they even arrive. First when the king's stagecoach runs over two peasant children who were in the path of their stagecoach and the families are given coins in compensation. Cécile is quietly horrified at the idea that the lives of two children could be paid off for any amount at all—and that the driver blamed the children's parents for not watching them when they were likely working to pay the taxes to the King. The second is when a peasant woman begs for bread outside their carriage and Madame (Elizabeth Charlotte) says that there's shortages everywhere but nothing can be done, and Cécile wonders how much bread Madame's fancy gold brooch would buy.
• Determined Doctor: Cécile's father helps anyone who needs aid, regardless of whether they can pay or not. Cécile is resentful of this, saying even an ox wants something for its work while her father treats everyone for nothing.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Kathleen's aunt hates her given name, Mary, and demands to be called Polly instead. Kathleen's parents find the whole thing silly and call her Mary anyway, but Kathleen and her siblings are happy to call her Polly.
• Double-Meaning Title: All the Girls of Many Lands book titles are designed to sound poetic and thus evoke the setting—but in the stories are all literally present and important to the character of the book in some way.
• Everybody's Dead, Dave: In Minuk: Ashes In the Pathway, Minuk's family is struck down with influenza and only she and her youngest brother survive. They attempt to seek help from another family camped nearby only to find that the other family was struck with the illness as well and all are dead.
• Fashion Hurts:
  • Discussed in Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway when Minuk's village is visited by a group of white missionaries. After Minuk's cousin goes through a coming-of-age rite, one of the missionary women tells them about her own coming of age when she had to begin wearing long skirts and corsets and putting her hair up, and admits that she initially found the changes incredibly unpleasant. Later, a nurse who's with the missionary group tells Minuk that she believes that corsets (specifically the tight-lacing concept that the missionary wife seems to practice) are not only painful to wear but are actually harming the health of the women who wear them—which is why the nurse, in defiance of her cultural customs, refuses to wear one.
  • Spring Pearl: The Last Flower contains references to one of the most extreme historical examples of this trope, foot-binding, which was near-ubiquitous in China at the time the story is set. Spring Pearl doesn't have bound feet, which causes some people to look down upon her; however given the pain of foot binding and the extent to which it limited women's lives, she considers her independence a more than worthy trade-off for having (comparatively) abnormal-looking feet and refuses to be ashamed of them.
  • Cécile find her new fashionable felt mules painful on her swollen feet after all the walking to the carriages with Madame she'd done. Madame lets her kick them off on the ride there.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Despite being frail and sickly for most of her life, Isabel's sister Hope recovers from a severe infection thanks to the knowledge Isabel learned from her aunt, who works as a nurse.
• Incurable Cough of Death:
  • Cécile's father has a nasty cough when he requests from Madame that she be taken to serve at the French Court. He later dies of smallpox—the cough having weakened him—leaving Cécile fully orphaned.
  • Narrowly averted in Kathleen: The Celtic Knot, as Kathleen's mother (after coming down with what initially seemed like a cold) becomes gravely ill—but ultimately pulls through and recovers.
• In-Series Nickname: Cécile and the court refer to the young Princes Louis as "Bretagne" and "Anjou", which they were the Dukes of respectively (presumably to prevent confusion since they're both named Louis and so are their father and the King). She also refers to the royal women by the titles of "Madame" with qualifiers, with the main Madame she serves being the sister-in-law of the King, Elizabeth Charlotte.
• Like Father, Like Daughter: Like her father, Cécile defies Dr. Fagon's attempts at bloodletting a member of the royal family and is exiled from court for it. However, she is successful where her father was not (helped that she did it along with Madame de Ventadour), and Anjou is not bled and lives. Madame de Ventadour says she has her father's strength.
• Made a Slave: Laleena (later renamed Leyla) inadvertently sells herself into slavery. She'd been told the people she went with were looking for women to be wives to wealthy men and were merely compensating the girls' families for giving up their daughters, and she believed it, taking the money to give to her poor family. She eventually learns that something similar happened to her Disappeared Dad (although he was taken as a prisoner of war, rather than selling himself in).
• Missing Mom:
  • Cécile's mother died two years ago from pneumonia, during a severe cold spell in the country.
  • The spring before the story begins, Isabel's mother died of "childbed fever" (what's now understood to be a post-childbirth infection), which she battled for months before ultimately succumbing.
• The Mistress: Madame de Maintenon is the mistress to the Sun King and has significant influence over him, which puts her in direct conflict with Madame. When Cécile is exiled from court, she sends her to be educated at St. Cyr, the school she founded.
• No Periods, Period:
  • Averted in Ashes In The Pathway, as Minuk's cousin goes through a coming-of-age rite after menstruating for the first time.
  • Somewhat Exaggerated in Leyla: The Black Tulip. Leyla hears multiple references to "becoming a woman", but she states on multiple occasions that she doesn't understand what they mean by "becoming a woman" or how one would make the determination that a girl had become a woman.
• Only Six Faces: Averted, unlike the American Girl line. Each doll's face was initially intended to be a unique sculpt but Minuk's smiling face mold was determined to be ill-suited to the character, so she was remade with Spring Pearl's mold. All the other dolls have unique faces.
• Penny Among Diamonds: Cécile, who has lived her whole life in the poor village of Rileaux, is elevated at her father's request to serve Madame Elizabeth Charlotte (whom she simply calls Madame) at the court of Versailles, caring for her pet dogs. She is shocked by the decadence of the court early on but connects with other servants and bonds with the young dukes Bretagne and Anjou, who love to see the dogs she cares for. She later learns that she was in fact born at court and her late mother was a fallen noble.
• Pet the Dog: When Cécile is exiled for her part in defying the court doctors and not letting them bleed Anjou, Madame de Maintenon—who has been framed as the antagonist for being The Mistress of the king—arranges (with Madame's pleading) for Cécile to attend St. Cyr, a fine girls' school of higher education (and the only one in the country) rather than simply sending her back to her peasant life orphaned. Notably, the school was founded by Madame de Maintenon, so it's possible her recommendation was direct.
• Pimped-Out Dress:
  • Cécile is placed into finer dress than her lowly peasant clothing when she is brought to serve at court, as the Dress Code requires even the servants at court to be dressed elegantly.
  • All the display dolls except Minuk are dressed in fancy-for-them clothing, rather than everyday clothing.
• Rags to Riches: Cécile is elevated from peasant life to serving at the court of Sun King Louis XIV, caring for the dogs of Madame Elizabeth Charlotte (requested by her father when they assist the sister-in-law of the Sun King after a horse accident). She later loses her position and is sent out from court by king's orders after defying the court doctors, but his mistress Madame de Maintenon offers to send her to St. Cyr to be educated—meaning she never returns to peasant life and is still able to contact the royals and servants she bonded to.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Neela's father proves to be this after Neela gives away an expensive piece of jewelry due to a misunderstanding (she thought it was outright gifted to her, not just given to her to wear). Rather than just punish her for the sake of punishment (something which he states doesn't do any good to anyone in the long run), he instead gives Neela a consequence that actually addresses the damage she caused: she is to take on extra chores around the farm that they would normally have to hire someone for until the value of the wages they save by not hiring outside help adds up to enough to replace the item Neela gave away. Despite the warning that this is likely to extend to a year or more, Neela is happy to be given a chance to correct her mistake, and grateful that she has a father who handles his child's mistakes in such a constructive way rather than one who would take a purely punitive approach.
• Rich Kid Turned Social Activist: One of the major characters in Neela: Victory Song is Samar, a man who was born to a rich family, but turned his back on that life to throw his lot in with the revolution. His parents have disowned him for this, but his sister still secretly keeps in contact with him, and she agrees to help Neela find her father because of Neela's friendship with Samar.
• Riches to Rags: Cécile learns this is the case with her parents. Her father was the second-rank Court Doctor, but exiled when he defied Dr. Fagon's bloodletting of the late Duke of Orléans; her mother was of a fallen noble family and marrying her father was below her station but the best she could do. The events happened ten years ago, meaning that Cécile was born at court but never learned so before both her parents' deaths.
• Rite of Passage: In Minuk: Ashes in the Pathway, Minuk's cousin goes through a series of coming-of-age traditions after she begins menstruating. The eponymous ashes are actually one piece of this rite, as the ritual calls for ashes to be laid down behind the new woman to symbolize the fact that she cannot "go back" to being a child. ^note According to real Yup'ik, however, this is historically inaccurate.
• Shotgun Wedding: At the end of Kathleen: The Celtic Knot, Kathleen's aunt Polly abruptly marries a man she had rejected multiple times and sails off for America with him. When Kathleen asks about Polly's previous boyfriend Bill, who she'd spoken glowingly of throughout the book, she only says that he turned out to be "no good". The implication^note supported by a few other hints, like her suddenly becoming sensitive to the smell of her own smoking is that Bill got Polly pregnant and then refused to marry her, so she accepted a proposal from her other suitor (presumably after telling him what was going on, as he seems to be aware of her condition) rather than have her child be born out of wedlock, and by going to America, they ensure that their child will be born in a place where no one will know the timeline of her relationships and be able to do the math.
• Shown Their Work: Not only were the various members of the French royal family all real, but the Madame de Ventadour actually did lock herself away with the Duke of Anjou so that the court doctors wouldn't bleed him during the measles outbreak that killed his parents and older brother. The death of the Duke of Orléans (the King's brother) is also told correctly—while his widow Madame doesn't state that he had a stroke, she does describe the bloodletting and emetics he was given to "cure" him. Author Mary Casanova states in the author's note in the back that while Cécile's story (along with her and several smaller characters) are fictional, the events are accurate to the era.
• Significant Name Overlap: The Sun King, his grandson the Dauphin, and his great-grandsons Bretagne and Anjou are all named Louis, as Louis was a generational name for royal sons of France. The younger two are distinguished in the text by their dukedoms, Bretagne and Anjou.
• Standard Royal Court: The Sun Court of King Louis XIV serves as the main setting of Cécile: Gates of Gold. Also doubles as a Decadent Court.
• Translation Convention: It can be assumed that the characters who are set in non-English countries are not speaking in English; the only characters where all the dialogue would actually be in English are Isabel and Kathleen, with Minuk being the only other character who knows any English at all (and she only uses it when she's speaking to the white missionaries). The books are primarily written in English with occasional words from the native language thrown in; glossaries in the back define any words used from other languages.
• Unishment: Isabel longs for a more interesting life and chafes at the expectations and restrictions placed on her as a girl in her era. About a third of the way through the story, she's caught sneaking out of her home with her maid to go see a play, and is punished by being sent to live with an elderly aunt in the country. Isabel is initially dismayed, believing that said aunt will be the latest in a line of adults trying to teach her to be a Proper Lady, but it turns out that her aunt is actually a strong, independent, educated woman — in other words, pretty much the exact kind of woman Isabel had always wished to become, and it turns out a large part of the reason she wanted Isabel to come live with her was in order to educate her, as she has no living children of her own and wanted to pass her knowledge along to the next generation, meaning Isabel gets a level of education most girls in her era could scarcely dream of. What's more, Isabel is ultimately able to use some of the knowledge her aunt teaches her to save her baby sister's life after she comes down with a dangerous fever. At the end of the story, her father sends her back to her aunt — not as a punishment, but in order to complete her education, as he's realized how much good it's done her.
• Worst Aid: A major plot point in Cécile: Gates of Gold. Cécile's father, a strong opponent of bloodletting as a medical practice, was exiled from the court after fighting the senior doctor Dr. Fagon regarding his extensive use of bloodletting; he did it anyways, which worsened the health of the king's brother the Duke of Orléans (and Madame's husband) and led to his death. Fagon continues to practice bloodletting, insisting that it keeps the royal family fit, and does it to them regularly. When the royal family contracts measles and Fagan insists on bloodletting to help them heal, Cécile, several nursemaids, and the Madame de Ventadour (nursemaid to the two young princes) barricade themselves in a room with the younger prince Anjou so that the doctors can't bleed him as they do with his parents and brother Bretagne. The prince, princess, and Bretagne all die, but Anjou survives. Cécile is exiled for what she did (as the king insists that someone has to be punished and Madame de Ventadour can't be exiled as she's Anjou's governess) but because her actions helped save the young prince's life and thus prevented a severe succession crisis, Madame pleads her case to Madame de Maintenon, who ultimately decides to offer Cécile enrollment at St. Cyr school for girls (the only school of its type in the country at the time), rather than just throw her out on the streets—in part because of her Blue Blood background.

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