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This article explores the relationship between nineteenth-century girls' literature and the personal diaries kept by adolescent female settlers in New Zealand during the period 1850–1920. If, as might be assumed, literary texts play a part in the construction of identity, the representation of the colonial girl in literature should resemble, at least in part, the lived experience of the settler. As the authors discover, though, the difference in genre convention between fiction and diary plays an enormous role in dictating to what degree this shared conception of the “New Girl” is evident. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]