Abstract: This paper explores the way both Ismat Chughtai in The Crooked Line and Colette in Claudine at School have represented female sexuality and psychosexual development from a teenage girl’s perspective. Despite setting in different periods, early twentieth-century colonial India and Belle Époque France, both novels portray the coming-of-age of young female protagonists navigating the tensions between personal desire and societal expectations.

Drawing insights from the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, and Luce Irigaray, the paper examines how gender socialisation influences a young girl’s relationship to her desire, identity, and agency over her body. The paper argues that these texts do not present girlhood as a passive stage on the way to adulthood, but as an active and often complex process of becoming. In doing so, Chughtai and Colette offer alternative representations of the female coming-of-age that is not shaped by conformity, but by desire, resistance, and the search for a self-defined identity within a patriarchal society.

Keywords: Female coming-of-age, female desire, gender socialisation, feminist literary criticism, female sexuality, comparative literature.