Australian author Jackie French stopped counting how many books she’d written after she reached 100 – and that was 13 years ago. Her latest novel, Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies (released concurrently with Millie Loves Ants, her latest children’s book), is first in a series that examine women’s changing roles in the 20th century.

Beginning in 1902, the novel follows Sophie Higgs, an Australian heiress of a corned beef factory, who attends a London finishing school for young women. The mysterious Miss Lily believes that a woman’s power lies in her ability to influence men. Under her tutelage, Sophie begins an extraordinary adventure across the Western front, and into the drawing rooms of powerful men.

Lou Heinrich: Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies is one of many historical novels you’ve written. What brought you to this story?

Jackie French: The journey for this one began a long time ago as I was researching A Rose for the Anzac Boys. I found a letter from a 16-year-old-girl to her mother. She and her friends had left school to start a canteen for soldiers.

The army did not have the medical facilities to look after the troops, nor the ability to feed, or transport them. This was done by women volunteers.

Women drove the ambulances. French women came out with pots of stew. Country towns in Australia would take up a collection for their only nurse to go overseas. All of this was because the British and the French did not have the resources or the competence to run the war.

Why are we not familiar with this aspect of the first world war?

Because history was written by men. Men who were extremely embarrassed and didn’t want to mention that we failed. Also, it just wasn’t their job. The war reporters, the regiment historians, who wrote the books of the war; their job was only to write about regiments.

If you read the memoirs of the women who were there, particularly the oral histories collected in the 1920s and 30s, then you realise the scope.

Historian Anne Firor Scott wrote about the assumption that history takes place on the battlefield. Due to their limited roles, “Women, therefore, by definition do not make history.”

Even the history that’s made on the battlefield forgets the number of women who actually were there. Who do they think cooked the food?

And there are some extraordinary stories. I discovered an incredible network of female spies. You see, it was so much easier for a woman to be a resistance worker. Every man who wasn’t in uniform would be conspicuous.

Are you writing women into history?

Yes – but not just women. Usually the theme is something I know that most historians have got wrong up until now. Often new sources are made available, archives are opened after a time.

Every historical book I’ve written is to correct the inaccuracies of the historical cliches we’ve grown up with. For example, when Australians think of their own history, they tend to think of Henry Lawson’s poems of the bush. They forget his poems of the slums of Sydney. Of children at eight or nine who slept on the factory floors and usually died before they were 20.

I don’t feel I am just writing from a woman’s perspective; I am writing the true history that has not been told yet. And it’s about the different way that we think about ourselves as women. The different ways that we exert power.

Australian historian Clare Wright wrote that the invisibility of women in the past perpetuates the lack of women in power today. Do you think these are linked?

Yes. To be a woman in power now, you need to be better than men.

There’s always a hiccup between social reality and our power structures. Our power structures usually lag behind 10 or 20 years (like the attitude towards gay marriage or global warming). The powerful retire and die off. Now we have the younger generation who have grown up knowing global warming, and about gender – they are working together. Things are changing.

• Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies is available now