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It is a rare gift to write about the psychological meaning of adolescent experience without losing the vitality of the young life contemplated. Dr. Dalsimer possesses this gift. Her book is so well written, well conceived, and entrancing that it stimulates the reader's eagerness to dwell again in delight with the adolescent characters in the beloved classics on which her critique is based. The choice of texts superbly fulfills the purpose of studying progressive phases, from the twelve-year-old boy-girl Frankie, in Carson McCuller's The Member of the Wedding, through the clique of high-school girls in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the private experience of the mid-adolescent Anne Frank in her Diary, the tempestuous Juliet in Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, and finally the twenty-seven-year-old Anne Elliot, who rediscovers the lost love of her late adolescence in Jane Austen's Persuasion.
"Psychoanalytic theory," Dalsimer says, "can enrich the reading of a text …" and "literary texts, in turn deepen our understanding of psychological process." She wants to extend the reader's awareness of the unfolding of female adolescence. In her own way, she joins the post-Freudian writers who render female development actually more