Lives of Girls and Women is often considered the most important Canadian translation of the male tradition of the bildungsroman, or novel of formation, which overlaps in many instances with the kiinstlerroman, in which the process of personal maturation is almost synonymous with the process of becoming an artist. Indeed, a number of critics have discussed the book in terms of its many echoes and reworkings of European antecedents, notably James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The book can also be considered a modernization of such nineteenth-century antecedents as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), which explore the complexities of human relationships and the lives of young women whose spirit and intelligence bring them into conflict with their respective societies. In the context of Canadian fiction, Lives of Girls and Women is a book which...