Questions of female development shape women’s studies in many fields as women seek to define those forces which mold their experiences. Surprisingly, this is the first book to study systematically and from a comparative perspective the female novel of development, or Bildungsroman. Prevailing definitions of the Bildungsroman derive from the conceptions of development based on male experience. The book offers an expanded generic model that incorporates the distinctively female patterns of realization and failed realization which emerge from the limited social opportunities depicted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel and from the particular features of women’s maturation as revealed by recent feminist psychoanalytic research.

ELIZABETH ABEL is Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, and editor of Writing and Sexual Difference (1982). MARIANNE HIRSCH is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, and author of Beyond the Single Vision: Henry James, Michel Butor, Uwe Johnson (1981). ELIZABETH LANGLAND is Associate Professor of English, Converse College, and editor of A Feminist Perspective in the Academy: The Difference It Makes (1983).