The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood

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 siècle 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.