becoming just the kind of resourceful and self-disciplined young men that the public
schools aimed to produce.
The only similar books by women writers, drawing on their own experiences and
writing mainly for adults, are The Getting of Wisdom (1910) by Henry Handel Richardson
(despite her name, a woman) set in Australia, and Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933).
These were not of enough status to give the girls’ school story a more positive image: if
Virginia Woolf or Ivy Compton-Burnett had gone to one of the newly emerging girls’
public schools and subsequently used her experience in her writing, critical attitudes to
girls’ school stories might have been very different.
Authors of children’s books elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world showed little interest
in writing school stories: two exceptions are very different in spirit from the stories being
published in Britain at the same period. Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did at School
(1873) was an exception in describing Katy and Clover Carr’s adventures at the New
England boarding school to which they are sent for a year to be ‘finished’; much of the
interest centres around the silliness of the other girls in their relationships with the
students at the nearby boys’ college, a topic ignored by British writers. In Ethel Turner’s
Seven Little Australians (1894) lively Judy Woolcot is sent to boarding school as a
punishment.
The heyday of the girls’ school story was in the 1920s and 1930s. It came in various
forms, in serials and short stories in magazines, annuals and miscellaneous collections
as well as in books, all of which were published in great quantities for the growing and
apparently insatiable market. Like most popular fiction, school stories emphasised what
were seen as middle-class virtues such as good manners, the need for self-discipline, a
sense of responsibility and a respect for authority.
By far the most popular girls’ writer before 1940 was Angela Brazil (1869– 1947),
whose name is known to many who have never read her books. She published her first
school story, The Fortunes of Philippa, in 1906, her last, The School on the Loch, in 1946.
Although her books reflected events in the outside world—the two World Wars, for
example—her underlying attitudes changed very little during forty years. Her fictional
schools range from small day schools to large boarding schools; her stories are episodic,
describing everyday school activities, but are usually underpinned by plots about
missing heiresses, the restoration of family fortunes or the successful achievement of
some important goal. Her books contain a lot of information about literature, geography,
history, botany, music and the visual arts (Freeman 1976:20). Schoolgirl readers of
Angela Brazil and her successors do not seem to have demanded an exciting plot;
rather, they were fascinated by the minutiae of school organisation and a lifestyle which
was probably somewhat different from their own experience.
Readership surveys of the period show that Angela Brazil was a favourite author
among girls from both middle-class, and working-class backgrounds. In 1933, The
Bookseller described her as a ‘juvenile bestseller’ (McAleer 1992: chapter 5). In 1947 she
was still the most popular writer for girls according to a survey carried out in north-west
England (Carter 1947:217–221).
Although a few of Brazil’s books are linked through the reappearance of characters
from an earlier book, most of them are free-standing. Her three most outstanding
successors, Elsie Jeanette Oxenham (1880–1960), Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1885–1970) and
348 SCHOOL STORIES