No longer banished to the realms of the Victorian "marriage or death" plots, girls in contemporary fiction embrace new freedoms while still struggling with plots centred on their bodies, societal limitations, and the price for freedom and escape. This study investigates the legacies of expectation, competing cultural ideologies, and multiplicities of growing up female at the end of the 20th century as portrayed in contemporary fiction by women such as Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Jamaica Kincaid, and Joyce Carol Oates. The essayists show how new fictions provide access to a constellation of themes and narrative patterns including race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, female subjectivity, and nationalism in new ways, while also continuing to envision girlhood in relation to such themes as love, separation from the mother, and maternal loss or overprotection.