Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age

The dominant form of the nineteenth-century novel was the Bildungsroman a story of an individuals development that came to speak more widely of the aspirations of nineteenth-century British society. Some of the most famous examples -- David Copperfield Great Expectations Jane Eyre -- validated the world from which they sprang in which even orphans could successfully make their way. Empire Girls: the colonial heroine comes of age is a critical examination of three novels by writers from different regions of the British Empire: Olive Schreiners The Story of An African Farm (South Africa) Sara Jeannette Duncans A Daughter of Today (Canada) and Henry Handel Richardsons The Getting of Wisdom(Australia). All three novels commence as conventional Bildungsromane yet the plots of all diverge from the usual narrative structure as a result of both their colonial origins and the clash between their aspirational heroines and the plots available to them. In an analysis including gender empire nation and race Empire Girls provides new critical perspectives on the ways in which this dominant narrative form performs very differently when taken out of its metropolitan setting.