This book contributes to childhood studies and girlhood studies in 19th century literature and culture by engaging girlhood, evangelicalism, and reform to investigate North America girls' texts.

Introduction Allison Giffen and Robin L. Cadwallader

Part I. Fictional Representations of Girls I: Coming of Age and Conversion

1. "Never was born" Again: Grace, Legibility, and the Rhetoric of Topsy's Conversion in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) Allison Curseen

2. Opaque Bodies and Perpetual Girlhood in Harriet Wilson's Our Nig (1859) Laura J. Schrock

3. "You have failed in everything": The Intersection of Spiritual and Academic Education in Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867) LuElla D'Amico

4. Queer Friendship in The Wide Wide World (1850) and Pollyanna (1913) Kristen Proehl

Pat II. Fictional Representations of Girls II: Reform and the Evangelical

5. "The things she had to say!": Listening to Deaf-Mute Catty in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871) Jaime Alves

6. Costly Sympathy: Evangelicalism and the Economics of Suffering in The Lamplighter (1854) Alison Tracy Hale

7. Dwarfism and the Evangelical: Little Mabel's Call for Reform Rachel Cope

Part III. Girls in the Archive: Excavating Representations of Girls

8. Daughters of a Reading People: Representations of African American Girlhood and Female Literacy in the Christian Recorder Vanessa Steinroetter

9. Lessons for Girls in Sunday School Stories: Representations of the Missionary Woman in Nineteenth-Century Religious Periodicals for Children in Protestant Canada Patricia Kmiec

10. "A Peep at the Heart": The Spiritual Life of Girls in Nineteenth-Century Methodist Fictions James M. Van Wyck and Christopher Anderson

Part IV. In Her Own Words: The Voices of Girls

11. "Heart Talk": Chinese School Girls' Letters to American Girls Karen Li Miller

12. Black Girls and Their Nineteenth-Century Autograph Albums Nazera Wright

Allison Giffen is Professor of English at Western Washington University, US.

Robin L. Cadwallader is Professor of English/Communications and Director of the Women's Studies Program at Saint Francis University of Pennsylvania, US.