"The Girl Within" is a resource for any woman who wants to recapture the girl she once was and to rediscover her authentic identity. The book examines female development in a way that is radical and at the same time immediately recognisable to its readers. Psychologist Emily Hancock's findings are based on her study of twenty women. Using their extraordinary life stories, she identifies a turning point in a woman's life - the period between ages eight and ten and the onset of adolescence - when a girl crystallises a distinct and vital sense of self, which she then loses in the process of growing up female. In dramatizing how young girls put their identities aside and then reclaim them during womanhood, she overturns the male-formulated view of the process of growing up that has dominated development theory from Freud to the present.