Passionate Friendship explores shojo manga, romance comics for teenage girls, by reviewing Japanese girls' print culture from its origins in 1920s and 1930s girls' literary magazines to the 1970s "revolution" shojo manga, when young women artists took over the genre. It looks at the narrative and aesthetic features of girls' literature and illustration across the twentieth century and discusses how these texts addressed and formed a reading community of girls, even as they were informed by competing political and social ideologies.