Brief History of Women’s Resilience

Reflection on “Bear Woman” by Karolina Ramqvist

A little context: the bear has long been a symbol of strength, courage, resourcefulness, wisdom, and intuition. In numerous Native American traditions, bears were believed to possess the power to heal their own wounds. They were seen as teachers and healers.

The plot of Bear Woman is simple and revealed early on: Who was Marguerite de la Rocque, the noble Frenchwoman who, in the 1540s, was abandoned on the Isle of Demons (in present-day Canada) as punishment for taking a lover? Or was her exile a calculated betrayal by her protector, designed to claim her inheritance? How did she survive for years alone, until a ship finally returned?

It’s a story that remains largely unknown. These were centuries when women were rarely seen, rarely heard, and seldom written about. And yet, remarkably, one of the first people to tell Marguerite’s story was another Marguerite: Queen Marguerite d’Angoulême, also known as Marguerite de France. It was the dawn of the Renaissance, and this Queen wrote. She included the tale in her 1559 work L’Heptaméron.

So why was I so resistant to reading this book?

At first, I thought it was because I had recently read another work with a similar premise: a writer obsessed with uncovering the truth about a historical figure. Then I found myself frustrated—irritated by the author’s confessions about motherhood, procrastination, anxiety, burnout, and writer’s block.

The question that kept pulling at me was simple: who is the Bear Woman? Is it one of the two Marguerites from the 1500s?  Is it the author? Or is it the author’s daughter?

Past, present, and future blur together in this mystery I longed to solve—without so much over-analysis.

The further I read, the more I found myself doing what I always do: researching. That led me to another work by Queen Marguerite—Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (Mirror of the Sinful Soul).

And here comes the shift. While looking for an English translation, I stumbled upon something extraordinary: Marguerite and Anne Boleyn were close. So close, in fact, that Marguerite gave Anne the original manuscript to read.  

Fast forward a few years.

In 1544, nine years after Anne’s execution, her daughter—an eleven-year-old named Elizabeth, who would one day become Queen Elizabeth I—translated Mirror of the Sinful Soul into English prose. She gifted it to her stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr.

Think about this:

A queen writes a spiritual reflection.

Another queen reads it.

A future queen translates it.

And centuries later, in 2025, I read it aloud with my daughter, straight from a digitized copy via the Royal Society of Literature.

And suddenly, it all clicked. This is more than history or literature. This is a transgenerational conversation — a quiet lineage of women speaking across centuries.
They share wisdom, strength, heartbreak, and resilience.
Just women showing up for each other across time and space.

It made me wonder:

What if we’re all part of this invisible network? What if the courage of one woman in the 1500s spoken through the voice of another, really can echo into my life, in 2025? Resilience built across generations, brick by brick, story by story.

If Einstein was right, and time is the fourth dimension, women have already found a way to transcend it.