In Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors, Barnita Bagchi examines writings that focus on female education and development by five representative British women writers who flourished between 1778 and 1814–Lady Mary Hamilton, Clara Reeve, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton and the early Jane Austen. In a climate in which female education was a subject of anxiety in print culture and fiction a site of contestation, and in which women were emerging as major producers both of educational writing and heroine-centred, ostensibly didactic ficition, these writers produced fictions of female education that were pioneering Bildungsromans. Highly gendered, these fictions explore key tensions generated by the theme of education, including the dialectics between formal and experiential education, between the pliable pupil obedient to pedagogical authority-figures and the more self-sufficient auto-didact, and between a desire for greater institutionalization of education and recognition of the flexibility given by distancing from established structures. Such fictions, Bagchi argues, are compendious and miscellaneous, encompassing diverse domains of knowledge, such as philosophy, politics and history. There is congruence between the ambulatory, tension-ridden patterns of female education found in these fictions and the distinctive, miscellaneous fictional knowledge they represent–their creators grappled with the epistemological and ethical status of fiction which they connected with female experience.