In November 1978, West End Press published The Girl, a rewritten version of a novel the author had first completed in 1939. The original story told of women struggling to survive a harsh winter in St. Paul after having suffered the loss of their male companions in a failed bank robbery. According to Le Sueur, it was a collective work: We had a writer's group of women in The Workers Alliance and we met every night to raise our miserable circumstances to the level of sagas, poetry, cry-outs. The rewritten version emphasised the fate of the farm girl of the title as she struggled to survive the death of her lover and give birth to another girl, the hope of a new and better generation.