Most canonical studies of gender and nationalism in Bengal leave out of their purview the resistances Bengali middle-class women waged against the social constructions of the bhadramahila figure. One middle-class woman writer who, in her quest for a liberatory politics, aligned herself with leftist-communist ideologies is Sulekha Sanyal. Sanyal published her novel, Nabankur (The Seedling’s Tale), a leftist female bildungsroman, when she was only 26. This essay examines the novel’s literary, class, and gender politics through an engagement with Sanyal’s problematization of both the patriarchal disciplining within a rural landlord household and the emerging middle-class bhadramahila discourse. Sanyal looks to the Communist Party and the peasant movement for affective places of belonging—ideological spaces from within which young women from middle-class and elite backgrounds could question genteel norms of gendered selfhood. Operating within an ideology of vanguardism, as Sanyal’s female protagonist does, leads to a complicated reinforcement and naturalization of the middle-class norms of gendered gentility, yet one that contests both the literary prescriptions offered by the Party and those of a more mainstream Bengali literary public sphere.