In the glorious, boozy party that followed World War I, a new being burst defiantly onto the world stage: the flapper. Young, impetuous, and flirtatious, she was an alluring, controversial figure, celebrated in movies, fiction, plays, and the pages of fashion magazines. But, as Linda Simon argues, the flapper didn’t appear out of nowhere. Lost Girls gives us a spirited history with a fresh look at the reality of young women’s experiences in America and Britain from the 1890s to the 1920s—the era when the “modern girl” emerged.

Lost Girls is a story of youth derided and fetishized; of aging viscerally feared. It is a story of young women growing up in a culture beset by anxiety about adolescent girls. It is about women trying to shape their own identity amid contradictory theories of adolescence and sexuality, the politics of suffrage, and popular fiction, theater, cinema, and dance hall crazes. Simon shows us how the modern girl bravely created a culture, a look, and a future of her own.

Lost Girls is an illuminating history of the iconic flapper as she evolved from a problem to a temptation, and finally, in the 1920s and beyond, to an aspiration.

Linda Simon is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Skidmore College in New York, where she has taught since 1997. Previously, she was Director of the Writing Center and at Harvard University. She is the author of biographies of Alice B. Toklas, Thornton Wilder, and Lady Margaret Beaufort, as well as articles in such journals as The New England Quarterly, Salmagundi, and Literature and Philosophy. She teaches literature and nonfiction creative writing and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.