The female Bildungsroman (or novel of development) is, in some ways, a contradiction in terms. Novels about the transition from girlhood to womanhood have historically been more about “growing down,” in Annis Pratt’s famous phrase, than growing up; they show their heroines learning to conform to gender norms rather than discovering themselves as individuals. Even if the novels contain subversive middles, showing us girls who run and play like boys and harbor ambitions for achievement or fame, they generally end rather depressingly with marriage and subservience, the heroines renouncing all of their earlier dreams.
Of course, the most beloved women’s novels toy with the genre’s conventions. Think Jane Eyre with its rebellious heroine and weakened hero, who come together in the end as equals; or Little Women with its decidedly unromantic match between Jo and Professor Bhaer, which Alcott added in fun when she couldn’t make Jo a literary spinster. Another common ending for the female Bildungsroman, especially for the willful heroine who refuses to conform, has been death, either as punishment or protest; here The Mill on the Floss and The Awakening come to mind. The latter is an interesting example of the novel of development that begins rather than ends with marriage, rightly acknowledging that many nineteenth-century women married before, not after, they had achieved maturity, and that the search for self did not always end on the wedding day.
Today the Bildungsroman remains an important genre for women writers, particularly as women continue to explore possibilities opened up thanks to modern feminist activism. But it would be wrong to assume the genre has only recently come into its own. The nineteenth century is full of varied examples that were relegated to virtual obscurity (along with their authors, but that is another story) that deserve to be read again—not only for their historical significance but also for the diverse forms of artistry they display. They also offer all of the joys of challenging convention that our old favorites do. While the following examples of the female Bildungsroman might be encountered in a college course, they are not widely known, and it is entirely possible to receive a degree in English without reading a single one. The movement to recover women’s voices of the past has waned somewhat in recent years, and thus each of these texts (although almost all are currently in print) are in danger of being forgotten again. Of all of the genres women have written in, the female Bildungsroman is one of the most important — for it often grows out of the author’s own lived experiences, providing a map to where women’s lives have been, and where they are going.
Anne (1882) by Constance Fenimore Woolson
A sensation in America and England when it was first serialized in Harper’s magazine, and the most popular novel of Woolson’s illustrious career (she was often compared to George Eliot and Henry James), Anne rejects the conventions of the domestic tale, following its eponymous heroine from her idyllic childhood on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron out into the cruel world. Anne Douglas belongs in the pantheon of iconoclastic heroines, as she goes against type, saving reckless maidens in danger and serving as a Civil War nurse, while also coming to accept her passionate nature, preferring to be true to herself rather than to conform to what others think is proper. Anne is a wonderful example of how the quest and romance narratives can converge in the female Bildungsroman. Anne is an epic love story, murder mystery, adventure novel, and coming-of-age narrative all rolled into one, sharing similarities with Jane Eyre and The Portrait of a Lady, yet Americanizing their themes. (This is the only novel on the list not available in a modern edition. It deserves to be.)
She threw herself into her Italian songs with so much fervor that Belzini sat aghast; this was not the manner in which demoiselles of private life should sing. . . . [Her teacher] always put down with iron what she called the predominant tendency toward too great freedom—sensationalism—in young girls. She spent her life in a constant struggle with the American ‘jeune fille.’
Bread Givers (1925) by Anzia Yezierska
Bread Givers is the powerful coming-of-age story of a second generation Jewish immigrant girl, Sara Smolinsky’s, who refuses to fall in line with the submissive model of womanhood her rigidly patriarchal father enforces and to which her mother easily submits. Anyone who has ever yearned for release from the confinement of childhood will empathize with Sara’s intense yearning for a freer, American way of life that includes gaining a college education. Here is a heroine who refuses to “grow down,” despite virtually all of the circumstances of her life that conspire against her.
My hands clutched at the knob. This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point for becoming a person. I simply must have this room with the shut door.
The Hidden Hand (1859) by E.D.E.N. Southworth
In Little Women, Jo March tries to write sensation stories like Southworth (called Mrs. S. L. A. N. G. Northbury), an indication of how popular she was in her day. Her most popular book, The Hidden Hand, was serialized three times and performed in forty different stage adaptations. Resembling Don Quixote more than the typical domestic fare of the time, it is a rollicking romp through the adventurous life an orphan girl named Capitola. We first meet her disguised as a boy in the streets of New York. When she is rescued by her ward, a wealthy Virginian aristocrat who wants to turn her into a lady-like Southern belle, she refuses to his efforts to tame her sharp tongue and fiery spirit. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, she jumps into the action whenever she can, even fighting her own duel and thwarting a would-be rapist.
“And so, sir, while all the ragged boys I knew could get little jobs to earn bread, I, because I was girl, was not allowed to carry a gentleman’s parcel, or black his boots, or shovel the snow off a shopkeeper’s pavement, or put in coal, or do anything that I could do just as well as they. And so because I was girl there seemed to be nothing but starvation or beggary for me!”
“Oh lord! oh lord! that such things should be!” cried Old Hurricane.
“Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (1900) by Zitkala-Ša
This collection of vignettes from Zitkala- Ša’s childhood was first published in the Atlantic Monthly and quickly followed up with “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians.” (They are printed along with other works in American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings.) Taken together, these three autobiographical works comprise a fascinating Bildungsroman that follows Zitkala-Ša (whose given name was Gertrude Bonin) from her Sioux family of origin to the white boarding school where she found enforced assimilation painful but also discovered her joy in reading and writing. She ultimately became a teacher herself. Throughout, she tells the stories from the point of view of her older, wiser self, who regrets her rejection of her Native heritage and criticizes the hypocrisy of her white teachers and the prejudice of her fellow students. Zitkala-Ša’s writings led to her dismissal from her teaching position, and she went on to become an activist for the rights of Native Americans.
Soon we were being drawn rapidly away by the white man’s horses. When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me . . . Now the first step, parting me from my mother, was taken, and all my belated tears availed nothing.
Moods (1864) by Louisa May Alcott
Readers of Little Women will be surprised by Moods, an earlier and darker novel of Alcott’s, written for adults. Heavily influenced by the feminist ideas of Margaret Fuller, Alcott explores the fate of a young woman, Sylvia Yule, who is ruled by her moods (not unlike Jo) and has not yet come to know and love herself before she jumps into marriage with a man she admires but does not love. Moods is that rare nineteenth-century novel that follows its tempestuous heroine into an unhappy marriage and into the murky territory of contemplating divorce (which other more famous novels, such as Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady assiduously avoid). Not surprisingly, the novel’s controversial subject drew criticism from reviewers.
“Something must be done about that child, father, for she is getting entirely beyond my control. . . . If I beg her to take exercise, she rides like an Amazon all over the Island, grubs in the garden as if for her living, or goes paddling about the bay till I’m distracted lest the tide should carry her out to sea. She is so wanting in moderation she gets ill, and when I give her proper medicines she flings them out of the window, and threatens to send that worthy, Dr. Baum, after them.”
The Morgesons (1862) by Elizabeth Stoddard
This strikingly original novel was brought back into print in the 1980s by two prominent literary critics who hailed it as worthy of comparison to Hawthorne and Melville; however, it still has yet to gain much of a reading. Part of the reason is probably what some have called its lack of polish and others have seen as a proto-modernist, elliptical style. But Stoddard’s refusal to connect all of the dots and explain her characters’ motivations is what makes The Morgesons such a thrilling read. Think Emily Dickinson meets Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter, with explosive passion lurking just beneath the genteel surface. The heroine, Cassandra Morgeson, tells her own story of passion and will set against the strict social milieu of New England, allowing the reader to immerse herself in one of the more original minds in nineteenth-century fiction.
“That child,” said my aunt Mercy, looking at me with indigo-colored eyes, “is possessed.”
When my aunt said this I was climbing a chest of drawers, by its knobs, in order to reach the book-shelves above it.
Our Nig; or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black (1859) by Harriet E. Wilson
Our Nig may be the first novel published by an African-American and is powerful example of a thwarted Bildungsroman. The title character, Frado, is a mixed-race girl in New England who is abandoned by her parents and given to a white family to raise. However, they can only see her as a servant and treat her as if she were a slave. A roman-a-clef that has much in common with slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Our Nig was written as an attempt to stave off poverty and to awaken the North to its own racism. It is a tragic tale of a young woman starved of love and robbed of her health and ability to grow into happy womanhood. Yet the fact that it was written at all is a triumph of will characteristic of the female Bildungsroman.
Thus passed a year. No intelligence of Mag [her mother]. It was now certain Frado was become a permanent member of the family. Her labors were multiplied; she was quite indispensable, although but seven years old. She had never learned to read; never heard of a school until her residence in the family.
Ruth Hall (1854) by Fanny Fern
Fanny Fern was the pseudonym of the popular newspaper writer and humorist, Sara Payson Willis. The highest paid columnist in the country and a powerful satirist, she delighted in mocking the hypocrisies of powerful men. In Ruth Hall, Fern took aim at her own family members, who refused to help her and her children after her husband’s early death. Reviewers called her unlady-like and vengeful while readers couldn’t get enough of this talented writer who was not afraid to speak truth to power. Told in short, episodic chapters that flout the formalistic conventions of the novel, Ruth Hall also flouts convention by beginning with a happy marriage, instead of ending with one. The heart of the story is a woman’s struggle and ultimate triumph in a patriarchal world that tries to silence women’s voices.
And so, while Ruth scribbled away in her garret, the public were busying themselves in conjecturing who ‘Floy,’ might be. . . . Some maintain[ed] her to be a man, because she had the courage to call things by their right names, and the independence to express herself boldly on subjects which to the timid and clique-serving, were tabooed.
Anne Boyd Rioux’s biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson and a collection of Woolson’s fiction, Miss Grief and Other Stories, are both out February 29.
A book list of mostly 19th century female bildungsromane without a single book I have read? I don’t know whether to hang my head in shame or jump for joy.
We can do both together? I, too, am excited/shamed by this list!
I was sure Karolina Pavlova’s A Double Life would be on this list, but it turns out I don’t know any, and upon reflection decided to be thrilled.
Exaaaaaactly what I thought! So much reading to do…
I … have some homework now. To the Gutenberg Project, posthaste!
On the one hand, these all sound great. On the other, I finally read Villette this week, due to all the Toast content, and I have been completely destroyed and am therefore not available to read other books.
i kind of wish i had just stopped before i got to the end of Villette.
This is the exact advice my sister gave me. But I’ve never read it because I’m annoyed anyway, just knowing that ending is there.
YOU MUST read it. Must.
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON. (And that delightful romp of cross-dressing, dueling and capitalism “The Hidden Hand”!) You are wonderful.
I wish I were good enough at Photoshop to make a gif of CFW telling Henry James, “How did you ever dare write a portrait of a lady? Fancy any woman’s attempting the portrait of a gentleman!” #nineteenthcenturygentleribbingofyourmenfriends
Also does the Toast get $ if we buy things through a link here?
One of her stories (“Felipa”) was in Chloe Plus Olivia! How gay is the rest of her oeuvre?
Lots of “devoted pairs of female friends”, lots of spinsters, lots of very pretty but useless young men who draw the devotion of rougher, older men.
She also somehow managed to subtweet Henry James (in “Miss Grief”) before she even met him.
“She also somehow managed to subtweet Henry James ”
Ooooooh (immediately adds to reading list)
Ages ago someone asked that last question and I’m pretty sure Nicole’s answer was, find a link to Amazon (any link) in another article, follow it, and then navigate to the book you want, and the Toast gets a cut. If you look at the “books” category I’m sure there are plenty with links, especially early on. I can’t remember which article it was a comment on, though, or for that matter whether that system still works. That is all the information I have.
Thanks!
there are TWO links via our Amazon affiliation; see the note where Anne’s two books are mentioned, just at the bottom.
I read Bread Givers in college! In a Women in Lit class, where we also read The Yellow Wallpaper and Jane Eyre and The Awakening. Heh.
THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. We read it in high school and I swear to God, it still haunts me.
Oh my god, the first time I read The Yellow Wallpaper, I found that by the end I was gasping for air. Good god.
Oh man. I often assign TYW to my undergrads when I teach Intro to Women and Gender Studies. The men generally come in looking a bit confused on the day we discuss it, while the women often come in looking haunted, as if they’d recognized something in the text that they’d have preferred not to see or acknowledge. It’s short, but it goes right for the jugular.
Bread Givers is actually taught in American Lit at my suburban US high school!
I had to link to Hark A Vagrant: https://pbrigitte.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/har…
Aw, K Beaton my heart.
OH MY GOD The Morgesons my heart. I totally skimmed through this list just to make sure it was on here. That book is so amazing.
This list is great, but my favorite of all time is Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book (1897). It’s got it all: smart, self-aware heroine, unhappy marriage, clear-eyed commentary on social issues and women’s rights… and an ending that doesn’t make you sob hysterically at life’s unfairness (looking at you, Mill on the Floss).
Thank you! I read that entire post while trying to remember the name of that book. That book is remarkable.
I’d also like to suggest ‘My Brilliant Career’ by Miles Franklin. It was written in 1901, and is a weird conversion of Australian colonialism, the outback, and Victorian ideals. Lots of efforts of a young girl to submit to gender roles, and then a general ‘fuck that’ at the end, that I enjoyed.
I haven’t heard of any of these others, and I need to read them all right now.
I loved the movie.
I’d throw in ‘Nervous Conditions’ by Tsitsi Dangarembga as a modern tale with a setting that feels older. The journey of Tambu from a girl trying to grow corn to finance her own schooling, to a young woman who has seen that education has not brought happiness or stability to several other women in her life but choosing to pursue it is so beautifully and carefully laid out. While looking up the info for this to make sure I was remembering accurately, I see she’s written a second book in the series that has gone straight on my reading list.
Ha, I was just coming on here to post that Nervous Conditions belongs in this list – glad someone else got there earlier! It’s brilliant. Everyone should read it!! Because everyone will love it!
(Indeed, there is a second book, and it’s really good as well – enjoy!)
Thank you so much for these fantastic recommendations– I must confess I hadn’t heard of any of them before. I’m very much looking forward to reading these, as well as your biography of Constance Fenimore Woolsen.
Is there a way to buy these on Amazon so that the Toast gets a cut…?
smile.amazon lets you donate to the charity of your choice when you make a purchase. Perhaps The Toast could set up something with them?
I’m sure that’s allowed only for registered non-profits, which The Toast is not. If you click through to Amazon from the site though, I believe they’re set up with affiliate links, which gives a small referral fee for anything purchased after the click-through
I think you can click through either of the links to Anne’s books (see bottom of the post) and buy from there and we’ll get a cut?
I am a big fan of all the public domain love on this site, but I think it would be great if you could link to the Project Gutenberg versions of these works. Most of them are on the site, and only have 20-60 downloads EVER. It’s a great, legal non-profit source for public domain works and it’s a shame more people don’t know about it.
Is Project Gutenberg still active,though? I tried downloading some books couple weeks ago and it kept “saying internal server error” .
Also http://girlebooks.com/
They have a huge focus on getting more women’s writing back in print. Buying their new publications helps finance the e-bookification and free publication of older women’s literature
Dayummmm this is why I love the Toast!
Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. If you hate all the stories in which the heroine dies to pay for flouting society’s rules (e.g. House of Mirth) then you will enjoy Undine Spragg’s ruthlessness.
I am staunchly a 20th century girl, but you have tempted me to wade into the 19th!
Not bildungsromane (now I know the plural!), but Joanne Dobson, who is on the cover as editor of the Capitola book, is also the author of several fine mystery novels set at a small New England college. Toasties would probably enjoy–murder motives include professional jealousy, plagiarism, etc. 🙂
Oh, what a great reading list. Someday.
Another book for your pile, though perhaps not for this list, is Julia Collins’ The Curse of Caste. It’s a contender for “earliest novel by an African-American woman”, but unfortunately she died before it was finished. More info: http://pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/Collins… http://www.amazon.com/The-Curse-Caste-Slave-Bride…
Such a good list! For those who can stomach poetry I’d add Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s book-length poem Aurora Leigh, about a woman poet who rejects marriage for art.
Seconding Aurora Leigh! Put it on my PhD oral exam list so I would be committed to reading the whole thing. Zero regrets.
I am real late to this because of pesky timezones, but Rosamond Lehmann! She is more early 20th Century than 19th, but Dusty Answer is a great female bildungsroman and pretty queer also. I had to read it for an English Lit class at French university (don’t ask) but I have never met anyone else who’s read her books.
I love you for writing this! Thank you, and thank all the recommendations in this thread! I recently vowed not to read a single book or watch a single movie about/written by white men this year.
This vow followed after I watched a much-lauded kids movie featuring popular children’s toy all about imagination, and yet the world was 90% “white male default” toys and one of the only speaking female character’s badassery was soon relegated to “the object in the middle of a love triangle”. But seriously, the movie lost me the second she was shown on screen, in slo-mo, shaking her plastic hair as if she was in Baywatch. (Ok it was the LEGO movie, might as well say it). Blech. MALE GAZE – YOU CANNOT ESCAPE IT EVEN IN CHILDHOOD…..
So yeah. This list is a balm to my soul.
This is an excellent list! If readers are looking for a 21st century female bildungsroman, I heartily recommend IN CALAMITY’S WAKE by Natalee Caple. Not only does it fit the bill of a young woman discovering her inner strength and growing as a person, but it’s also one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read.
I love Caple’s book so much. If you’re interested in revisionist, feminist westerns in general, I heartily recommend Courtney Collins’ The Untold (aka The Burial). It’s a similarly meta historical novel, set in the Australian frontier of the 1920s, and it’s brutally beautiful. “If the dirt could speak, whose story would it tell?”
p.s., it looks like Anne by Woolson is available in a Kindle edition. I know what I’ll be reading tonight!
Ah, sigh and sigh again! I am in grad school and working three jobs and have like 3 D&D campaigns going right now. I literally do not have time to suddenly have a long and enticing new list of books to read…
Why would you do this to me??!!
Sigh, sob, smile.
Most of these books (and SO many more) are available at the Celebration of Women Writers site: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/
(I used to type for them – super nice people)
Wonderful article about a subject I hadn’t really thought about before, but definitely should have. Love what you say about “each of these texts (although almost all are currently in print) are in danger of being forgotten again.” A great reminder that we must constantly reproduce culture, or at the very least the memory of it, lest we lose it. Thanks for bringing this to the forefront of our collective consciousness, Anne!
Really fascinating that I haven’t heard of most of these. Will order many, including the new ones by the knowledgeable author of this article!
Great list! Nada by Carmen LaForet is along these lines, except it’s about growing up under Franco in Spain. (Usually I avoid literature in favor of sci fi or fantasy, thanks, high school English class! but these look really good).
I’d love to think as classics they are available through my local library but I doubt it. That’s fine really – I needed another excuse to go and buy some books
Most of them should be in the public domain, so if you like (free) ebooks, try this- http://www.gutenberg.org/
Excellent German plural there in the title.
Non 19thC, but: For Love Alone, Christina Stead. A ferociously intelligent and idealistic woman wants complete fulfilment in love and in life, but men are garbage and she’s stuck in a provincial backwater (pre-war Sydney), so it’s a long road. Picked this up as a kid, pre-feminist-awakening, and the intensity of this character blew the top of my head off. One of the great bildungsromane of 20thC imo, but bc it’s an Australian book, by a woman & about a woman, it’s not so known.
You left out one of the very great ones: The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather.
there are TWO links via our Amazon affiliation; see the note where Anne's two books are mentioned, just at the bottom.
I like Alice in Wonderland for her ability to stand there on her own two feet, to not be intimidated, and to think her way out of bizarre predicaments. Plus she is not dead at the end like so many spirited females are in books and films.
I found Bread Givers at a used book fair. It made me so angry: at religion, at men, at tradition. It certainly expanded my worldview but it didn’t bring many smiles.
It's a good film too. (And I can't help correcting you, it's set in the bush, not the desert outback.)
Thanks, Toast readers, for all of the great comments! It was such a pleasure writing this article and seeing all of the interest in these little-known women writers (especially the shout-outs to Constance Fenimore Woolson, who is my own favorite). You all are the best!
Thanks, Toast readers, for all of the great comments! It was such a pleasure writing this article and seeing all of the interest in these little-known women writers (especially the shout-outs to Constance Fenimore Woolson, who is my own favorite). You all are the best!
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It does have romance but marriage is not the ultimate end. Second (thirty-fifth) My Brilliant Career.
I loved the movie.
Fun fact: the guys in my MFA program used to call female bildungsromane “My First Bra Lit.”
This is a fantastic list. Pardon my late entry to the conversation. I had bookmarked your article when it first posted, but wasn’t able to read it until now. I’m completely inspired. We must keep these women’s names alive. They are our ancestors, they paved the way, they are the shoulders we stand on. I’m particularly happy to know about to know about Zitkala-Ša. I’m working on a novel inspired by the women in my family with First Nations/Native American, and particularly, Sioux heritage. Thank you for this valuable resource!
Pardon the late comment, but if you’re a fan of the female bildungsroman, you may want to check out some of the women novelists of the Jacobin period, especially Mary Wollstonecraft’s incomplete (she died after giving birth to Mary Shelley) novel Maria; or the Wrongs of Women. Her character Jemima is incredible, and through her story Wollstonecraft upends the legal and historic fiction of rape as “seduction” and calls it for what it is: a crime of violence against women; Mary Hays’ Victim of Prejudice tackles the same subject, along with women’s education and the stigma of illegitimacy. Though not a bildungsroman in the traditional sense, The History of Mary Prince (1831) is the autobiographical account of an enslaved woman who leaves the British West Indies and invokes her right to liberty when she arrives in England. Lots of layers to this one since it is transcribed and edited by British abolitionists, which complicates the notion of voice. (Interesting aside: the woman who transcribes Mary Prince’s account is Susanna Strickland Moodie, who would later emigrate to Canada and become a well-known author; she makes a cameo appearance in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.)