The Awkward Age in Women's Popular Fiction, 1850-1900

Covering an extraordinary range of long-forgotten Victorian women's fictions, Sarah Bilston investigates how writers thought about female adolescence before 'adolescence' was a term of currency. It discusses why women authors so often centred on adolescent heroines, and it considers how representations of the turbulent, disaffected adolescent laid the foundation for the feminist New Woman heroine at the end of the nineteenth century.