Bent Northrop Memorial Library

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday October 9, 2012, she almost paid the ultimate price.

Miles Franklin's 1901 ground-breaking debut, and an instant sensation. Meet Sybylla Melvyn, the young girl hungering for life and love in outback New South Wales. First published in 1901, this Australian classic is the candid tale of the aspirations and frustrations of sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl constrained by middle-class social arrangements, especially the pressure to marry. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla...

This novel about the effects of America's repressive moral climate was controversial in its day, and its availability to the public was delayed 12 years because of the "immorality" in Dreiser's sordid, realistic portrayal of the downfall of an innocent young woman who leaves her country town for the big city.

When Victoria Jones starts working for a florist, she realizes her talent with flowers helps her change the lives of the people who buy her creations. But when she must confront her painful past, she has to decide how much she is willing to change.

One of Wharton's first novels to deal frankly with a young woman's sexual awakening, "Summer" created a sensation when it was published in 1917. Praised for its realism and candor by such writers as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, it is now considered a classic of American and women's literature.

We meet young free-spirited Rachel Vinrace aboard her father's ship, the Euphrosyne, departing London for South America. Surrounded by a clutch of genteel companions -- among them her aunt Helen, who judges Rachel to be "vacillating," "emotional," and "more than normally incompetent for her years" -- Rachel displays a startling maturity when she finds her engagement to the writer Terence Hewet listing toward disaster.

Alice had charm, looks and ambition, but lacked the money to keep up with the town's society. With her parents' help, she tries until a young man forces her to face facts.

The story of Sylvia,a young girl raised by her parents to think for herself and participate in the world of adults. As she grows up she feels conflict between her life with her parents and the town and university life that they do not conform to. When she encounters her Aunt Victoria and is drawn towards her luxurious world she further grapples with the desire for wealth and luxury and the concern for social inequity.

Ann Radcliffe's orphaned heroine Emily St. Aubert finds herself imprisoned in her evil guardian Count Montoni's gloomy medieval fortress in the remote Apennines. Terror is the order of the day inside the walls of Udolpho, as Emily struggles against Montoni's rapacious schemes and the threat of her own psychological disintegration. A best-seller in its day and a potent influence on Sade, Poe, and other purveyors of eighteenth and nineteenth-century...

Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College,...