Once upon a time, long before Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls elbowed aside fairy-tale princesses and replaced them with inspirational trailblazers like Ada Lovelace and Amelia Earhart, an idiosyncratic fictional heroine was rebelling against sexism in children’s literature, captivating young readers around the world and showing them that there was more than one way of being a girl.

With her red plaits and freckles, she thumbed her nose at social conventions and had moxie to spare. She was independent and legendarily strong – so strong she could lift a horse with one hand. She was also in possession of a private income thanks to a stash of gold coins, and, at all of nine years old, lived alone with her monkey and horse, freeing her to sail the high seas and boogie with burglars. Little wonder successive generations of girls wanted to be her – some of us still do.