In a recent interview, New York punk poet Eileen Myles calls for men to stop writing. “I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation,” Myles says. “There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books.”

            Since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg popped the tab on a can of pilsner and congratulated himself for having invented the printing press, readers and writers and people who aren’t either have been telling us what we should or shouldn’t read. When one Caliph Omar was asked what was to be done with the library of Alexandria, he was reported to have said that, if the books in that library contained doctrine opposed to the Qur’an, they were bad and must be burned, whereas if those books supported the most important text of Islam, they should be burned anyway, for they are superfluous. More recently, Kingsley Amis, who has written some of the least plot-driven novels ever, said he only wanted to read novels that begin “A shot rang out.”

            Me, I only want to read novels about young women coming of age.

            Long before I read F. R. Leavis’s monumental The Great Tradition (named one of the “100 Best Non-Fiction Books” by The Guardian in 1916), I had fallen hard for Henry James and especially his curious, quietly passionate, and well-off heroines, from Claire de Cintré in The American to Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. They were and are beautiful to me, even though I couldn’t and can’t see them. I loved them because everyone else in their worlds did, especially the men who, when I began reading James, were about my age and were also more than a little clueless, as was I.

             I could write my own book about why a single young woman with a fortune is more interesting than a similarly lucky young man, but suffice it to say here that the promise and the peril are much greater for a member of the female sex. Money equals freedom in James’s world. That’s still true to a large extent in ours, but in the nineteenth century, a woman with her own money was a rare bird. She could fly, yes, but at every turn there were those who were ready to snare her, including men who had no idea that they were about to do just that. The fact these well-meaning fellows were often aided by less-than-scrupulous female confederates only makes the scenario juicier.

            And even women who were freed by their money were subject to another type of imprisonment, that of the traditional roles of mother and wife. My mother, who grew up on a farm in South Louisiana, used to go to New Orleans with her girlfriends for weekend “sprees,” as she called them, during which they stayed at the Roosevelt Hotel on Canal Street and ordered room service and roamed the French Quarter and played pranks on themselves and hapless passersby. When I asked her why, my mother sighed and said, “Because we knew that was the the last time we’d be free.”

            Once you take from life the need to make a living, courtship and marriage and parting and heartbreak are most of what is left. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum defines the novel as a “complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.” We become more merciful when we read novels, says Nussbaum. And when you’re young, you’re more desirous, I might add, more sure that there’s someone out there who is perfect for us, as we are for them. During the form’s rise in the nineteenth century, the scolds who said novels would corrupt young people were right. Otherwise, what’s the point of reading them?

            Henry James led me to George Eliot and especially to Middlemarch and its heroine, the desirable and misguided Dorothea Brooke. Why does she have to marry that bloodless stick-bug of a human being Edward Casaubon? When I was a teenager, Ava Gardner married Frank Sinatra, and my father stormed through the house saying, “Why did she marry him when she could have had me?” Ten pages into Middlemarch, I began to adore Dorothea Brooke. I still do.

            This cocktail of young man’s ardor and bibliophilia took me through college and on to graduate school, where I discovered The Great Tradition. F. R. Leavis is famed for his take-no-prisoners prose. The first paragraph of his critical masterpiece begins, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad” and ends “except Jane Austen, George Eliot, James, and Conrad, there are no English novelists worth reading.” Between those two sentences, Leavis is happy to “pronounce Milton negligible, dismiss ‘the Romantics,’ and hold that, since Donne, there is no poet we need bother about except Hopkins and [T. S.] Eliot.” I wouldn’t go so far as to pronounce Conrad negligible; it’s more that I think of him as a side dish on the banquet table whose main courses are Austen, Eliot, and James.

            Especially James. Let me start my recommendations with The Portrait of a Lady (1881). This is  where it all began for me. James more or less sets up a lab experiment: he takes an eager and gifted young woman; endows her with a fortune whose source is unknown to her, meaning there are no strings attached; and sets her free in a laboratory, a/k/a the world. What happens next? A lot. Isabel Archer is pursued hotly by an English lord and an American mover and shaker and is loved from afar by a consumptive cousin (the source of that fortune, by the way) but gives herself to an expatriate named Gilbert Osmond who lives in Italy. Complications ensue, and the novel concludes inconclusively. You can write your own final chapter to the unfinished story of Isabel Archer, and readers have been doing that ever since The Portrait of a Lady appeared.

            The next best book in what F. R. Leavis calls The Great Tradition is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), whose Dorothea Brooke is no less memorable than James’s Isabel Archer and no less imprisoned in a calamitous marriage than Isabel is, a marriage critic Michael Gorra calls “half-frozen.” Filmmakers have tried to adapt both The Portrait of a Lady and this novel, but while there’s no good version of the former, I recommend without reservation the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch starring hunky Rufus Sewell as the love interest, Patrick Malahide as spew-making Casaubon, and heartbreakingly beautiful Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke. I’m a happily married man, but if I suddenly found myself in Dorothea’s little town decked out in high waist pants and button-up boots and a loose shirt topped by a cravat or ascot, believe me, I’d give Rufus Sewell a run for his money.

            Okay, you’ve done your homework. Once you’ve finished The Portrait of a Lady and Middlemarch, you can go anywhere, and since we’re already playing fast and loose with chronology (the second novel was published first), let’s keep it that way— who reads books in order except grad students? Gustave Flaubert was another of Henry James’s favorite authors, and for good reason: in Madame Bovary (1856), Flaubert’s young heroine also accepts a marriage proposal from the wrong guy, which leads to complications that are not only frustrating but fatal. In Jane Eyre (1847), Jane Eyre sidesteps the early marriage trap and waits until she’s grown up enough to arrange exactly the kind of union she wants. Too, Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817), avoids the fate of other heroines as she goes through the typical Austenian mishmosh of meetings, flirtings, misunderstandings, partings, and eventual (re-)discoveries of just the right chap.

            To go back further still, there’s Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), the subtitle of which, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, could apply to any of the novels discussed here. As Austen’s will do later, Burney’s heroine slaloms through English society and ends her long run (contemporary editions run over 500 pages) in the arms of the gent she was pretty much predestined for anyway.

            If you’re looking for an American version of this kind of thing, there’s Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott. That title, too, sheds light on all the books I mention; it describes its subjects as apprentices of sorts. Critic Sarah Elbert says the term “little women” refers to the period in a female’s life where childhood and young womanhood overlap and, in this case at least, there are ups, downs, births, deaths, a fair amount of misery, and a lot of joy as things turn out the way you hoped they would. Unless, of course, you’ve had it up to here with happy endings, in which case you might want to cross the Atlantic again and tackle Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), the eponymous heroine of which ends up not at the altar but—spoiler alert—on the gallows for stabbing to death the man who destroyed her happiness.

            Ready to step toward the present day? If you like stories about young women making their way in the world, you can do a lot of your one-stop shopping with Toni Morrison. Click the “Coming of Age Fiction” link on the Amazon page, and the first eight books you see are by her. Number nine is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and after that the Morrison titles start up again. You can’t go wrong reading Beloved (1987), which won four national prizes the year after it appeared, including the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but if you’re looking for a new take on the James/Eliot/Austen model, for my money you should start with her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, who’s about to give birth to her father’s baby. Novels like The Bluest Eye are just one reminder of both the limitation and the potential of F. R. Leavis’s original idea about what constitutes a Great Tradition.

            If you’re looking for something in a still more contemporary idiom, here’s a fistful of suggestions from recent years; I don’t bother with dates here because they’re all more or less contemporaneous. Times have changed, and most contemporary heroines are not heiresses. But the template is the same. There is a young woman who hasn’t figured herself out yet. The people she knows and will know want things for her, but they also want things from her. Her position in the world is more fraught than that of a young man. For one thing, she is expected to fail in a way that they are not, sometimes by her own family. The good news is that none of them do, at least in the sense that their story is told, and it’s told by someone as empathetic and aware as you will be, reader, by the time that story is finished.

            Quickly, then: In Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld tells how fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves her loving family to make her way in a boarding school where the other students include Aspeth Montgomery and Cross Sugarman (those pretentious names say everything you need to know about what will happen next). The protagonist of Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach begins her story at age twelve and goes on to become the first female Navy diver in World War II. Sure, it’s a coming of age story, but it’s part noir thriller as well, and the detail Egan gives to the assembling and donning of the deep-diving suit is riveting (pun intended). Yes, the college freshman heroine of Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion has a boyfriend, but he’s a lot less essential to her intellectual and spirtual growth than the much-older feminist who becomes her mentor. And the life of groundbreaking Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad is fictionalized in Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik.

            I haven’t said anything about memoirs by young women who’ve come of age because they deserve their own essay, but I’ll mention a couple here. Since you can’t go to a party or walk into a coffee shop these days without someone recommending it, I will assume everyone has read Tara Westover’s Educated, her account of growing up and escaping from and returning to a fundamentalist family. That she returns to her brutal family is the most revealing aspect of Westover’s journey, but while a lot of memoirs point fingers, and rightly so, others are starting to appear in which the central character addresses her own culpability. Thus it is for In The Land of Men by Adrienne Miller, whose description of her relationship with David Foster Wallace makes him sound like a handful yet doesn’t spare Miller herself. I read In the Land of Men at the same time I was reading Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, a novel with a similar and totally credible take on that unruly drama we call love, especially young love, that comi-tragic affair in which there are almost always no heroes yet no villains, either.

            There’s a wonderful column about George Eliot by David Brooks in the November 13, 2014 issue of The New York Times in which Brooks describes Eliot’s own coming of age. Eliot was a mess as a young woman. She was brilliant but not physically attractive in any conventional way; perhaps for that reason, she was emotionally needy, falling for one man after another and being rejected by them all. When she was 32, she fell in love with philosopher Herbert Spencer, one of the few men who was her intellectual equal. In a move extraordinary for her times, she wrote Spencer a letter declaring her love. It didn’t work. But the writing of that letter was a pivotal point in Eliot’s life, says Brooks, for “after the years of disjointed neediness, the iron was beginning to enter her soul.” Not long after, Eliot met and entered into a lifelong romantic relationship with George Lewes and began writing the chain of novels that peaks with Middlemarch.

            What all the books I’ve mentioned in this essay have in common is that they depict the iron beginning to enter some young woman’s soul. That process is a commonplace as well of movies whose names are legion: just as everyone I know has read Tara Westover’s Educated, they’ve all seen Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women as well. But here’s an even better movie that may have slipped below your radar. It’s called Leave No Trace, and it’s based on a novel, Peter Rock’s My Abandonment. Produced by Anne Rosellini, Linda Reisman, and Anne Harrison and directed by Debra Granik, Leave No Trace is the story of a 13-year-old girl who lives in the woods with a father she worships, an Iraq War vet who suffers from PTSD. Gradually, though, the girl becomes her own person—the iron enters her soul, as David Brooks says.  Three women lead her into maturity: a “dancer” who shows her how to wave flags after a church service, a beekeeper, and mainly a woman who manages a kind of trailer park for veterans and other disaffected types. Finally, she says to her father, “the same thing that’s wrong with you isn’t wrong with me,” and they part company as she joins the community and he returns to the woods. Good? Don’t take my word for it: Leave No Trace is one of the rare movies to get a 100% rating from the Rotten Tomatoes site.

            Be they movies or TV series or novels or memoirs, stories by and about young women coming of age are plentiful, and more appear every day. A couple of years ago, Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter, a novel with a 22-year-old protagonist who works front of house in a celebrated New York restaurant, shot to the top of the charts and garnered critical acclaim from every corner. I couldn’t get into it. The main character came across to me as someone who makes terrible choices in life and love and then blames everybody except herself. But the most important implement in the book critic’s toolbox is an open mind, so when Danler’s memoir Stray appeared, I began to read it, if skeptically. Sure enough, Danler herself seem to be making the same mistakes her fictional heroine did and taking no responsibility for them.

            And then I read this sentence: “I am trying to untangle the mess love has made of me,” and for a moment, I thought my heart had stopped. I didn’t cry, but I gulped a couple of times and sniffled. Forgive me, Stephanie Danler. Forgive me, everyone I’ve ever misled or confused or disappointed. At one time or another, and usually multiple times, love has made a mess of us all. That mess is hard to untangle, and it might not even be possible to do so. But a good book is the place to start.

– David Kirby