Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture - Imperial Girls, 1880-1915 (Electronic book text)

Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915 is the first book-length study of girlhood and empire in Victorian and Edwardian print culture. Redressing the neglect of popular girls' texts, it relates the emergence of fictional girl adventurers, castaways and 'ripping' schoolgirls to the British Empire. It provides both a new perspective on familiar girls' literature, such as the Girl's Own Paper and the novels of E. Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett, and the first detailed examination of lesser known fiction, such as girls' robinsonades, the novels of Bessie Marchant and Angela Brazil, and the first Girl Guide Handbook. This book shows how imperial concerns not only informed the way in which girls were imagined as mothers and civilisers at home in Britain, but also as colonial settlers, nurses and explorers, on whom the very future of the Empire depended.