ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the serious business of dressing-up, with the games girls play together as part of the process of moving towards adulthood: trying out new roles, taking up different positions and discarding them, putting clothes on and taking them off. It is also an essay about cultural hybridity: I want to identify a cross-national literary tradition in which the influence of Madame de Stael's Corinne (1807)2 is paramount.
