This book suggest that, in a particular kind of British and Commonwealth novel, there is a relationship between the hero's journey into maturity (bildungsroman) and the spirit of her age (zeitgeist). How a particular kind of novelist defines and measures maturity, and the process through which her hero matures, changes between the neoclassical, romantic, realist, naturalist, modernist, and postmodernist periods, and continues to change in the post-postmodernist period. In describing this suggestion, Michael Giffin draws on novels written by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Henry Handel Richardson, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Margaret Atwood.