The Girl investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the twentieth century as portrayed in contemporary fiction by women. The essayists show how new fictions of The Girl provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or overprotection.

Mrs. Dalloway is considered a central work in Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre and in the modernist canon. It not only addresses historical and cultural issues such as war, colonialism, class, politics, marriage, sexuality, and psychology but also reimagines the novel form. Moreover, Mrs. Dalloway continues to grow in its influence and visibility, inspiring adaptations in film, theater, print, and other media.

While scholarship on Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing individually has grown in recent years, this is the first book to examine together these two great writers of the twentieth century. Its four thematic sections engage readers and scholars in several provocative contemporary concerns: female subjectivity, forms of women’s fiction, the complex relationship between mind and body, mother/daughter relationships, and women’s aging.