Launched into the ocean of life: navigating the transition to womanhood in 1850s fiction -- The transitional stage theatrical girlhood in 1870s fiction -- Coming out: passages to womanhood in British and Anglo-Indian fiction, 1880-1894 -- On the threshold : female adolescent experience in the fiction of the fin de siècle -- A scant but quite ponderable germ: girls growth in Henry James' The awkward age
Summary
Bilston investigates how writers portrayed female adolescence and discusses why women authors so often centred on adolescent heroines. She considers how representations of the turbulent disaffected adolescent laid the foundation for the feminist New Woman heroine at the end of the 19th century
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-241) and index
