Girlhood is often seen as a transitional state between childhood and adulthood and as a result defining the ‘girl’ is both a challenge and a contradiction. Anita Harris has discussed the difficulties of defining a girl, noting that ‘any book that focuses on an age- and gender-based category as its subject of inquiry immediately runs into the problem of implying a natural, fixed state of being for that category.’¹ This collection emphasises the multiciplicities of girlhoods operating throughout the British Empire. The definitions here range from girls of less than ten to married women in their seventies and eighties. They include fictional characters and real girls and women. They are settlers, they are mixed race, and they are Indigenous. They have voices of their own that have been recovered, or their presence is found in the absences in the historical record.²

This collection is united by its focus on Britain and its colonies. John Darwin describes the empire as a ‘world-system’ that developed a wide range of relationships that were intended to ‘promote the integration of … widely separated places’ through commercial, strategic, political and – ‘by diffusing British beliefs and ideas’ – cultural means.³ The colonial girls under discussion here are all linked, to a certain extent, by the ways in which the British ideals of femininity, race and imperialism were promulgated throughout the empire. At different moments in time and place, we see girls performing their femininity in very similar ways and being similarly impacted upon by the operation of imperialism.

In contrast, Thomas Richards argues that the British Empire was ‘something of a collective improvisation’ that was produced through its creation of an archive of knowledge.⁴ In this volume, Kristine Alexander argues that the archive can be a difficult place in which to find evidence of girls’ agency. The examples that are available, in diaries, marginalia and other texts produced by children, yield little information about those who are non-white, poor, or disabled. Sarah Duff similarly shows that the voices of South African servant girls are largely missing from the archive. The records we have about these kinds of colonial girls were typically produced by middle-class men and women and were written from their privileged perspective. Nevertheless, we can look to other kinds of sources to overcome what Alexander describes as the ‘limits of language’ in the study of girlhood and colonialism. As she exemplifies in her chapter, visual evidence, such as photographs, can represent a greater diversity of young people than written records. Angela Woollacott provides a model of how to marshal ‘fragmentary evidence’ of marginalised girlhoods to gain insight into the workings of settler colonialism. Through ‘happenstance ethnography’ Fiona McDonald captures the voices and memories of women who lived as colonial girls.

Telling the stories of colonial girls can help us to see aspects of colonialism that might not otherwise be visible. The revelatory potential of exploring the gendered implications of colonialism is evident in the growing body of scholarship, originating in the 1990s, that examines women’s relationships to empire. Anne McClintock points out that white women did not enjoy identical power relations to men in colonial settings. Instead they experienced a tension between privilege due to their race and subordination due to their sex: ‘white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting.’⁵ Terri Doughty uses the fictional example of a female robinsonade that appeared in the most popular girls’ magazine of the nineteenth century, the Girl’s Own Paper, to explore some of these ambiguities. Tamara S. Wagner examines some of the complexities of publishing in the Australian marketplace, especially for women, in light of a small colonial publishing industry and the need for a London-based publisher to ensure success. Beth Rodgers shows that the Irish girl was similarly torn between the positions of being both a subject and agent of empire. Nevertheless, as this volume confirms, girls occupy a different position to women. They have less power and are acted upon to a greater degree because of their age, and therefore experience colonialism in ways distinct from those felt or enacted by women. While boys could expect to grow into the role of ‘the brave heroic figure of nineteenth-century imperial rhetoric’, girls could never occupy this position.⁶

Colonialism is a lens through which to see variations among historical and fictional girlhoods; girlhoods are a lens through which to see patterns in colonialism, patterns that are often based on race and class. Richards asserts that the British ‘liked to talk about their empire as if it were a sort of extended nation’ that gave the empire ‘the sense of symbolic unity that it so often lacked in practice’.⁷ Yet colonial girls occupy ambivalent and sometimes contested positions in British and settler societies. They can be a destabilising force that challenges conventional expectations of girls or a disruption that can, and must, be contained. This need for containment is especially evident in representations of Indigenous girls, as Clare Bradford demonstrates in her discussion of stories that narrate the tragic fates of Māori princesses to warn of the dangers of miscegenation and illustrate the barbarity of Indigenous people. Other narratives promote the futility of containing Indigenous girlhoods, which Juliet O’Conor elucidates in her analysis of Australian children’s fiction.

The writings of British-born settlers about and for girls contribute a further degree of complexity to the developing picture of the colonial girl. These texts both perpetuate and occasionally challenge British imperial and gender ideologies, reflecting loyalties torn between ‘home’ and new dominions. Although girlhood can have an important signifying function linked to freedom, independence, novelty and modernity, it may also represent an idea that needs to be controlled to serve the needs of the nation. Across national boundaries, the malleability of colonial girlhoods is evident. In British print culture, Indian girls were often represented as victims of an unenlightened culture that offered poor educational opportunities. These kinds of perceptions manifested, as Subhasri Ghosh’s discussion of the age of consent in India exemplifies, in attempts to legislate and control Indian girls. In each national context, the workings of colonialism produced different models of idealised girlhood, from which Indigenous girlhoods were often marginalised.

Valerie Walkerdine explains that girlhood is ‘constituted in and through the discursive practices that make up the social world’.⁸ As our contributors demonstrate, the discursive practices operating within the colonial world are diverse and multifaceted. Cecily Devereux asserts the importance of fashion to present and represent the figure of the productive, valuable, desired, British colonial girl in Bessie Marchant’s adventure fiction. Laura Ishiguro makes a related claim for the importance of clothing as a method of constructing Britishness in an colonial location. Terri Doughty explores the discursive space of girls’ print culture in the extensively illustrated form of the Girl’s Own Paper.

Crucially, the empire itself was in a state of dramatic flux across what is often called Britain’s ‘imperial century’. The empire grew substantially in size and in population in the nineteenth century and its expansion was integral to eventual movements toward independence for white settler societies. Imaginings of colonialism and girlhood are both subject to radical change across the century, and several chapters read the intersections and synergies in these transformations. Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver highlight how print culture yoked girlhood with emerging concepts of nation after Australian Federation in 1901. In our chapter, we show that the models of femininity appearing in Canadian and Australian girls’ fiction in the early twentieth century vary substantially, in part owing to the different requirements of these young nations.

Many contributors gesture towards the anxieties associated with the girl who is no longer a child, but has not yet married. She represents a disturbing figure who is potentially beyond the control of family and unconstrained by societal norms. Catherine Driscoll has argued that girlhood articulates notions of transition, process and transformation; this transition needs to be disciplined and controlled. Susan Cahill, for example, argues that girlhood ‘tends to embody society’s anxieties about uncontrollable futures’. Woollacott emphasises the importance of legal systems, labour systems, class, material resources, cultural privilege – and of course racism, sexuality, gender and violence – in structuring and mediating girls’ lives under colonial regimes. For example, as Duff explains, the majority of black adults in South Africa occupied the same legal status as children.

In addition to the broader networks associated with nation and empire, girls are also often connected to networks of family. In part this is owing to the traditional association between femininity and domesticity in which a girl was expected to progress through the roles of daughter and sister into wife and mother. Thus much of her education throughout her girlhood was designed to instruct her in the skills she would later require to be a success. In this way, the needs of the nation were incorporated within the needs of the family. This was particularly important for white settler women, who were valued for their civilising function as well as their reproductive abilities. Yet we also see in this collection that Indigenous girls were valued for their domestic skills. Race is consequently an important element of familial networks since Indigenous girls were expected to contribute to the work of the household, thereby freeing white girls and women for other purposes, as Doughty pinpoints in the fictional story of ‘Robina Crusoe’. In some cases, other related institutions attempted to replicate this relationship. As Duff demonstrates, the pseudo-familial relationship between employer and servant girl was part of the reason why girls rejected domestic service in favour of the unambiguous commercial transaction of working in a factory. Alexander highlights the role of the Church in simultaneously breaking the natural family connection and replacing it with an institutional one.

This collection reveals an important truth: colonial girlhoods are diverse. Together these chapters bring together fictional and real girls from the Caribbean, Mauritius, India, Canada, Australia, Britain, Ireland and New Zealand. They are white, they are mixed race and they are Indigenous. Yet even when the girls’ lives are remarkably similar, as in Woollacott’s discussion of Australian girls between 1820–60, the rapidly shifting colonial frontier reveals the importance of race, class, wealth and education.

Histories of the colonial girl can be complicated by examining the interplay of gender, empire, indigeneity, and class in literature, material culture and society. This collection includes contributions from scholars located in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa, India and Singapore who adopt a variety of disciplinary perspectives including those of literary studies, children’s literature, history and anthropology. To foster comparison and contrast across these colonial locations, the chapters have been organised into thematic groupings including ‘Romance and Marriage’, ‘Race and Class’, ‘Fictions of Colonial Girlhood’ and ‘Material Culture’. Nevertheless, this does not mean that each theme is exclusively discussed in just one section, as ideas about maturation, racial identity, social position, literature and culture permeate the entire volume.

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History aims to situate the real and fictional experiences of girls from a diverse range of locations around the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in relation to each other. Part One, ‘Theorising the Colonial Girl’, reflects on the importance of examining girlhoods to help us see aspects of colonialism that might otherwise be elided. Angela Woollacott provides a focused example of the value of such comparisons in her chapter, which identifies the commonalities of colonial girlhoods in both ‘colonies of exploitation’ and settler colonies, despite the class, ethnic and race distinctions that divided them. She collects the stories of two sets of girls, the first from Jamaica, Mauritius, India and South Africa across the time span of this volume, and the second from Australia in the period of the 1820s to 1860s. Many of these girls can only be known to us through fragments of historical evidence. In addition to telling us more about the lives of individual colonial girls, Woollacott demonstrates that piecing together their largely unexamined stories can reveal much about the structures of colonialism, the operation of colonial households, and the relationships between settlers and labourers.

Cecily Devereux focuses on the construction of the Anglo-colonial girl in print culture. She considers the way in which the cultural representations of this imagined colonial girl functioned as an ‘agent of empire’, both advertising and consuming its products and technologies, and as an ‘imperial commodity’ in her textual circulation. The adventure novels of British author Bessie Marchant reveal how colonial girls are ‘made’ in fiction and the work that they perform in the ‘symbolic making of empire’. Devereux draws on Thomas Richards’ concept of the British Empire as a ‘paper empire’ or fictional space, to propose that Marchant’s fictions similarly represent the empire as fantasy, just like the colonial girls within them who are also British-made textual constructions.

Girlhood invites questioning of the possible futures for women – what might they become and what might become of them. Part Two, ‘Romance and Marriage’, shows the ways in which marriage and maternity inflected debates about girls’ imagined potential to ‘civilise’ racial others, their sexuality and their employment. In Chapter 4, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver consider a range of anxieties prompted by young Australian women’s work in the early twentieth century. They examine a series of published essays by Beatrix Tracy, entitled ‘Explorations in Industry’, which pinpoint a range of vocational typologies, such as ‘the shop girl’, the ‘domestic servant’ and the ‘chorus girl’. As Gelder and Weaver demonstrate, Tracy’s forays into various realms of work, though at times progressive...