The writings discussed contest the central premise on which the Bildungsroman from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre onwards has been based: that the individual’s self-realisation and successful integration into family and society are one and the same. On the contrary, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jerusalem the Golden (1967 ) and Tipping the Velvet (1998) illustrate the difference between the needs of the protagonist and the expectations her family and society have of her as a woman. The ‘voyage in’ (a psychological journey) undertaken by female protagonists is often very different to the ‘voyage out' undertaken by the male. In multiple reworkings women have rejected the conventional ending in marriage as a metaphor for the social contract using a variety of non-realist genres such as the gothic, the grotesque, the utopian and dystopian, the fantastic, the fable and the fairy tale. Beginning with Angela Carter’s reinvention of Goethe’s marginal characters in Heroes and Villains (1969) and Nights at the Circus (1984), this chapter shows how Radclyffe Hall, May Sinclair, Winifred Holtby, Meera Syal, Andrea Levy, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Dorothy Richardson, Sarah Waters, Jeannette Winterson and others have questioned the temporal logic of the classical Bildungsroman and disputed its ameliorative optimism.