So I finally not only get motivated but remember what I wanted to get around to - posting some links in here - and just as I sit down to it the rain decides to really let go. Oh it's been pouring on and off all day, but this is the real downpour type where you hear thunder rumbling closer and closer. And since we're good at having the occasional power outage when we get a lightning strike at the nearby power station - yeah, I shouldn't dawdle much before hitting the save button.

For now, just one link and a list!

Eight Classic Female Bildungsromane You Should Know About If You Don’t Already
Anne Boyd Rioux, The Toast, February 18, 2016

 

"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.
... While the following examples of the female Bildungsroman might be encountered in a college course, they are not widely known, and it is entirely possible to receive a degree in English without reading a single one. The movement to recover women’s voices of the past has waned somewhat in recent years, and thus each of these texts (although almost all are currently in print) are in danger of being forgotten again."

And even with that English degree I'd only heard of one of these in passing - that I remember. Sadly. All the more reason to make a booklikes list in hopes that I'll get around to reading a few:

Female Bildungsroman

I should add that several of them are available free on kindle, which means they'll be on gutenberg and other places as well. Only one was just in paper format - that I could find at the moment.

And bam, massive thunder, we're having the lights go dimmer and I hear hail. Time to save and perhaps get offline? Seems a better idea to be reading rather than on the computer!