7 Literary Characters Who Break the “Teen Girl” Trope

The phrase “teenage girl” tends to conjure up images of hormonal bodies and see-sawing emotions—not focused and powerful brains. And yet, some of the most famous girls in literature gain exceptional mental gifts when they hit adolescence. Carrie White, for example, Stephen King’s telekinetic teenager, develops her cognitive power when she gets her period and experiences what King calls “mental puberty.” She takes revenge on her bullying classmates and burns down the whole prom using only her mind. 

These formidable female brains aren’t a modern phenomenon. As a Shakespearean, I’ve studied how the teenage girls in his plays use their newly sharpened cognitiv...