Autumn comes in with a high gale and here I am this September to write away with you on an exploration – of girls in books, of inner and outer landscapes. Like the best adventures, though not perhaps the best essays, it is likely that borders and edges will be misted over, vague, malleable. Come with me, because while I do not write academy-well, I have work to share and voices (or fragments, or urges, or single lines) to which I wish to bear witness.

Thinking about girlhood having been a girl (or to be inclusive, even having been a human child) is a little like plunging your hands into a compost bin made of your memories. At first your fingers grasp slippery peels, the vague and vaguely (or sharply) distressing shapes. Push down into the wet Weetabix of hay made in your own summers of life and half dissolved, down further, until you reach some harder texture – and there you feel out the ridges of the mountain above your home town, the layer of cold crisp snow that fell the first winter you remember clearly, or else tent pegs and pine needles, or the crumbling wall of the gas station where you hung out with your friends, breathing fumes – and suddenly all these memories are over you.

This is to say it can be a sensory overload, and difficult to parse. But reading fictions of girlhood gives structure, lays out paths down and out: it allows you to recognise and grasp the singular from your life in among the mass of universal common grounds. Equally so it can wrong-foot, befuddle, pain, explode received notions, leave you clammy and smelling of sliddery leaves. Let’s say, to be positive, that a focus on Literature of the Girl can write new pathways in the brain, granting as it does access into an area of experience that has not been exalted in the way that, for one obvious example, young manhood has.

My idea for this month is to set out one reading list for a hypothetical course in Literature of the Girl. Pairs of books, which I will then follow with comparative essays on each pair. For writers more than academics, since as I said my academic abilities are not so white-hot. This all might be a breadcrumb trail, a series of dropped stitches. Metaphors take over where well-thought out analysis and theory should be. In between the essays will be short fictions, perhaps and hopefully disruptive, by girl lit writers, including myself.

Now, to attempt cohesion, it’s helpful for me to at least try to define what I mean by Literature of the Girl, and what I take a girl to be.

A girl is –

A child over the age of three. A woman who would be called a girl, usually in a derogatory way. When she has no partner, no children, no house, no respectable career, but studies and has a sequence of perhaps harsher jobs to keep her together – so usually a woman in her early twenties, but sometimes later. A girl is also one who calls herself a girl, self-determining to varying degrees of urgency. A girl is rooted in a home. A girl inhabits her sense of loss and the machinations of the road. A girl is tossed on the seas of existence, thrown from place to place. A girl sees every blade of grass. A girl is inattentive. A girl is queer. A girl likes boys, likes men. Likes boys and girls and men and women and non-binary folk. A girl feels no desire, yet or ever. A girl doesn’t know. A girl acts herself and other selves. A girl analyses. A girl is passive – sexually and in her life choices. A girl is active, tearing a way through the world. A girl is of any race or class. A girl is disabled, visibly or invisibly, or chronically unwell. A girl is mentally ill. A girl is full of religious ecstasy. A girl is without any gods and just fine with that, thank you. Or miserably seeking gods or meaning. A girl experiences the variety of experience as a girl. Which is to say different to as a woman (with responsibilities, with the belief she is a woman) and different to a boy (who often gets more agency than a girl could) and different again to a man (who speaks himself and has his self broadly accepted, more often than not).

Literature of the Girl, then, is any writing, almost exclusively by a woman writer, that tackles the human condition through the prism of girlish experience. I put in the caveat ‘almost exclusively’ because I feel that it might be possible that a transman might choose to write on girlhood, and I don’t feel he should be left out. Of course transwomen are included under women writers. Cis male writers though? Tricky. While I’m of the opinion that any writer should be able to write about whatever and whoever they want, traditionally it’s cis white male writers who’ve granted themselves this opportunity and had their work accepted with little snuffing. So, on my imaginary course I leave them out, so that they can fill lists everywhere else. Should Lit of the Girl be classified as female coming-of-age novels? Of first loves and the first raw unhurt steps out into the world? I don’t think so – hoping to embrace works that both build to a point of development and resolutely do not.

Do not take these summaries as declarative or final – I know I am leaving out so much, and having spoken appear to exclude. We can agree that all folk behave as they do because of their environments but also because of their own inclinations. That hairs could be split forever, down to their atoms and lower until the whole thing falls drastically apart. So again, fuzziness of lines is important here. Giving breathing room. Likewise the question of whether ‘X’ a writer of Literature of the Girl is wide open to debate. Which is good. Debate, disagreement, coming to blows over nomenclature or taxonomy. When someone is moved so much as to get disgusted and furious and cleverly scribbily over another person’s interpretation. In this way are points raised when otherwise they might not be.

In sum: for the purposes of this slender pseudo-course: A girl is what the author defines her as, and the author has been at one time a girl, or has been taken for a girl. The books on the reading list are those I have sought out or encountered, so expect the limitations of a Scottish writer who reads a lot of North American literature but few modern YA books (the sole reason for their absence on this list – my own ignorance at the present moment).

1. The Tale of Genji (thinking only of chapter five, ‘Wakamurasaki’) by Murasaki Shikibu + The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf

2. Green Girl by Kate Zambreno + Another Country by Anjali Joseph

3. YA edition 1: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark + The White Bird Passes by Jessie Kesson

4. The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan + How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland

5. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children by Bhanu Kapil + Domestication Handbook by Kristen Stone

6. YA edition 2: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson + I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

7. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride + I Have Blinded Myself Writing This by Jess Stoner

How much I’ve had to leave off! I wanted Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, but could think of nothing it could be compared to in a fruitfully oppositional way. Likewise Maidenhead by Tamara Faith Berger (and in any case, I handed my copy over to a friend a while ago). The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, which might have paired off with_ Green Girl_. But this is where you can contribute – names, titles, reasons of your own to add. Yell at me about this list’s under-representation of Oceania and Africa and South America. Let me know what I must read in order that one day, when I am in a position of authority, I will be able to teach important works of girlhood. I’ll also be posting a couple of sample essay questions at the end of each comparison. If you feel moved to write responses, I’d be glad to read them here.

The general schedule for posts is this: One post every other day, roughly alternating between –

1. Comparative mini essays from this imaginary Creative Writing university course reading list on ‘Literature of the Girl’.
2. Fictions and flash from girl-lit writers (some exciting pieces to share!) and occasionally myself.

This is all time permitting of course. I hope you will enjoy my tenure here (if not, tell me kindly if at all – Professor Nabokov I am not), and will do the reading if you are so inclined. Today counts as intro to the essays, so I shall post here again on Thursday with the first piece of fiction.