ABSTRACT
The demarcation of reading by age is always a tricky one, perhaps especially so when it comes to teenage fiction. The concept of young adults as a separate group to be addressed and instructed was put forward by the educationalist Sarah Trimmer as long ago as 1802. The reserve and modesty of books such as Fifteen was followed by a wave of books which were considerably more sophisticated and complex. Teenage fiction emerged almost simultaneously with the first soundings of the women’s liberation movement but it remained unaffected by it for a long time, even though the majority of novels written at the time were by women and directed predominantly at girls. Lynne Reid Banks used her romance My Darling Villain to tackle parental control and particularly parents’ views about class head on. Heterosexual sex between teenagers has long been widely accepted, even if the writing about it has been coy, but gay sex has largely been kept hidden.
