The image of "the girl" in contemporary fiction by women today stands in stark contrast to configurations of girlhood in earlier fiction. No longer banished to the realms of the Victorian "marriage or death" plots, girls in contemporary fiction embrace new challenges and freedoms while still struggling with plots centered on their bodies, societal limitations, and the price for freedom and escape. This collection tackles the contemporary forces at work on both the girls in fiction created by women and the writers themselves. It investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the 20th century as portrayed in contemporary fictions by women. The contributors aim to show how contemporary fictions of "the girl" provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, female subjectivity, and nationalism in new ways, while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or over-protection.