Late to the party but I’ll add my input .
My Glock 48 is great for grip size and is now my main range pistol , but I also really really like shooting the Browning 1911/380 . The Browning is quite a bit slimmer then the Glock and I dig shooting .380 . It’s not nearly as ….chunky to handle as the Glock .
If she can , get her to handle one of these baby 1911s , like me she might really like them .
Grip size is one piece of the puzzle, the other big piece is grip strength. I like the tennis racquet analogy again - the player can have a right size of grip, but it is counter productive to have too heavy a racquet because all the pros big tall guys use heavier racquet. Like wise, the pros are big guys have size of hands that of gorillas, you can't follow them if you have smaller hands than them. Everyone can pretty much air swing the heavy racquet a few times at the shop, but out on the court for 60 minutes back and forth with people throwing balls at high speed with top spin, all the cracks start showing. Weight, vibration....all hurting the performance, and it cliffs down instead of a steady roll off a slope.
The smaller the gun, the more vicious the recoil pulse( lighter slide and stiffer recoil spring). Compact gun with short grip means less fingers can wrap around - so the shooter have to use 1 finger to do the job of 2 or 3. The shooter gets double whammy'ed. A super big but here, for a strong hand over a certain strength level, it is just "harder" but the perceived difference is minimal. A good analogy will be that if you can lift 100 lb, 105 lb probably won't be much of a difference to you because it is only 5% more. But if you can only lift 50 lb 5 lb is 10% more. For someone with a grip strength that is just enough to handle a full size, any more incremental increase in difficulty means way more proportional to his/her ability. Get a grip strength measuring tool, you maybe cracking at 45kg, but she might be barely getting to 30Kg - you are 50% over her. Your 10% incremental change = 15% to her, your 20% incremental change is 30% to her. Performance is not linear. As "load" and "recoil" increase, difficulty increases at a faster rate and at one point it just goes rocket up - means complete failure in performance.
This is like buying any sporting equipment - skii, racquets, boards, bikes. It needs to go with size, strength, purpose and skill level. Right now, we have a lot of talking on size - but very little discussion on the other 3 factors.