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 fictions by women, tackling the forces at work on both the fictional girls and the writers themselves.

The first collection of critical essays to examine the portrayal of girls in contemporary women's fiction within the context of recent sociological and psychological analyses of girls, The Girl proposes that contemporary stories of girlhood constitute a new lens for literary and cultural study.

Examining the work of authors such as Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joyce Carol Oates for their revelations and representations in regard to girlhood, these essays speak to, complement, and contest one another in a compelling interrogation of what it means to grow up female at the end of the millennium.