Transforming Girls: The Power of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence refocuses the history of the girls’ book and female adolescence through a comparative analysis of forgotten bestsellers aimed at adolescent girls in the United States and Germany. While these stories rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy, they also provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. The ... More

Transforming Girls: The Power of Nineteenth-Century Adolescence refocuses the history of the girls’ book and female adolescence through a comparative analysis of forgotten bestsellers aimed at adolescent girls in the United States and Germany. While these stories rely on gender binaries and suggest that girls must accommodate and support a patriarchal framework to be happy, they also provide access to imagined worlds in which teens are at the center. This is a space where mentors who trust themselves and the girl’s essentially good nature neutralize the girl’s own anxieties about maturity. These mid-nineteenth-century novels focus on female adolescence as a social category in unexpected ways. They draw not on a twentieth-century model of the alienated adolescent, but on a model of collaborative growth. Adolescence—a category that continues to engage and perplex us—is defined in these novels as a celebration of fluid identity and the deliberate construction of a self. Through insightful readings of best-selling novels, Transforming Girls explores the origins of the young adult novel, mothering as a communal enterprise, the teaching of gender identity, the girls’ book as a model for narratives of nation building, and homesickness as an antidote to nostalgia. It provides access to a forgotten group of texts that reframe our understanding of the history of the girls’ book, young adult literature, and the possibilities of adolescence. The awkward adolescent girl—so popular in mid-nineteenth-century fiction for girls—remains a valuable resource for understanding contemporary girls and stories about them.