“She Strode into the Room like a Challenge”: Revisioning Nineteenth-Century Arctic Exploration in Stef Penney’s Under a Pole Star (2016)

The dominant narrative of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration portrays male explorers as heroic figures battling harsh conditions. This exploration was tied to national identity and a masculine ideal, while women’s roles were marginalised and overlooked. Historical novels today are important in revising and challenging such dominant historical and cultural narratives. This article examines a Scottish historical novel, Stef Penney’s Under a Pole Star (2016), outlining the various ways in which it offers a revisionist and feminist representation of Arctic exploration and challenges nineteenth-century gender roles through the portrayal of Flora Mackie, the daughter of a Dundee whaling captain. Flora’s role as Arctic explorer disrupts and challenges notions of the Arctic as a masculine space, while her close friendships with Inuit as contrasted with other explorers’ racist bias lay bare the exploitative colonialist dynamics in European and American exploration of the Arctic.