Private Babes

Beginning in the late Victorian era, more nuanced depictions of girl protagonists became popular. Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid, and other tales featured themes that ventured into tragedy. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll featured a widely noted female protagonist confronting eccentric characters and intellectual puzzles in surreal settings. Moreover, Carroll's controversial photographs of girls are often cited in histories of photographic art. Literature followed different cultural currents, sometimes romanticizing and idealizing girlhood, and at other times developing under the influence of the growing literary realism movement. Many Victorian novels begin with the childhood of their heroine, such as Jane Eyre, an orphan who suffers ill treatment from her guardians and then at a girls' boarding school. The character Natasha in War and Peace, on the other hand, is sentimentalized.
By the 20th century, the portrayal of girls in fiction had for the most part abandoned idealized portrayals of girls. Popular literary novels include Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird in which a young girl, Scout, is faced with the awareness of the forces of bigotry in her community. Vladimir Nabokov's controversial book Lolita (1955) is about a doomed relationship between a 12 year old girl and an adult scholar as they travel across the United States. Zazie dans le métro (Zazie in the Metro) (1959) by Raymond Queneau is a popular French novel that humourously celebrates the innocence and precocity of Zazie, who ventures off on her own to explore Paris, escaping from her uncle (a professional female impersonator) and her mother (who is preoccupied by a meeting with her lover). Zazie was also made into a popular movie in 1960 (Zazie dans le métro) by French director Louis Malle.
Books which have both boy and girl protagonists have tended to focus more on the boys, but important girl characters appear in Knight's Castle, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Book of Three and the Harry Potter series.
Recent novels with an adult audience have included reflections on girlhood experiences. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden begins as the female main character and her sister are dropped off in the pleasure district after being separated from their family in 19th century Japan. "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" by Lisa See traces the laotong (old sames) bond of friendship between a pair of childhood friends in modern Beijing, and the parallel friendship of their ancestors in 19th century Hunan, China.