Covering a range of long-forgotten Victorian women's fictions, Sarah Bilston investigates how writers thought about female adolescence before 'adolescence' was a term of currency.
Tracing evolving treatments of female adolescence through a host of long-forgotten women's fictions, the book reveals that representations of the girl in popular women's literature importantly anticipated depictions of the feminist in the fin de si cle New Woman writing; conservative portrayals of girls' hopes, dreams, and subsequent frustrations helped clear a literary and cultural space for the New Woman's "awakening" to disaffected consciousness.
The 'new' texts that Bilston has uncovered and her resistance to flattening the views of nineteenth-century women into one or two camps are especialy valuable.
