Yesterday afternoon my first article for The Toast went live. What a great experience! The shares on Facebook are nearing 900. And the comments are so lively and nice. Thank you Toast readers!

The title is:

Eight Classic Female Bildungsromane You Should Know About If You Don’t Already

It begins:

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.

You can read the rest here: http://the-toast.net/2016/02/18/eight-classic-female-bildungsromane/ including my description of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Anne, the only one not in print (but it should be).

I write more about 19th-century women writers wiped from history in my monthly newsletter, The Bluestocking Bulletin.