Retrospective: The New Girl

It took a great many years to produce The New Girl, but both the initial idea and the course of its progress grew from the context of a feminist academic's career in the 1970s and 1980s. Teaching women's studies and children's literature courses provided some background, and an invitation to edit Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia absorbed five years of mental energy while the idea took shape. Finally a sabbatical in London in 1989 provided six months of productive research time, followed by other interruptions before the book emerged. This article also corrects one error in the book: L.T. Meade's actual year of birth is 1844.