mixed, independent boarding schools such as Dartington, Bedales and Summerhill, but
almost certainly she chose to set her first school stories in one because they first
appeared as serials in Sunny Stories, a magazine intended to appeal to both sexes.
However, the girls-only school was far more popular with the girl readers (who were in
the majority), and after Whyteleafe came St Clare’s and Malory Towers, both girls’
schools. Beginning with The Twins at St Clare’s (1941) and First Term at Malory Towers
(1946), the careers of the O’Sullivan twins and Darrell Rivers respectively are chronicled,
from the time they arrive as new girls until their final term. Darrell is one of Blyton’s
most attractive and convincing characters.
If Enid Blyton was influenced largely by the demands of her market, Mabel Esther
Allan was genuinely interested in the theories of A.S.Neill, who founded Summerhill,
when she created several co-educational boarding establishments among her numerous
fictional schools. She acknowledges his influence: ‘All my schools were progressive ones,
where pupils relied on self-discipline and not imposed discipline. Many of them were co-
educational’ (Allan 1982:16). The School on Cloud Ridge (1952) is about a co-educational
school, Lucia Comes to School (1953) about an equally progressive (but all-girls) school,
where potholing, walking and cycling take the place of organised games. Lucia, half
Italian, arrives at Arndale Hall to find that it is nothing like the schools described in the
English school stories she has read, but although the rules are made by the girls
themselves and school work is done on a flexible learning basis, she still has to learn to
fit in with the other girls.
Although Blyton and Allan use many of the conventions and situations pioneered by
earlier writers, their style and attitudes are very different. Their schoolgirls have more
freedom and their outlook is more modern. This is also true of Nancy Breary who,
between 1943 and 1961, and writing about more traditional schools, produced a
succession of humorous stories, skilfully ringing the changes on standard plots and
characters.
Three outstanding writers for girls in this period were Mary K.Harris, Antonia Forest
and Elfrida Vipont. Mary Harris specialised in school stories; her first, Gretel at St
Bride’s (1941) is a fairly conventional boarding school story although Gretel is an unusual
heroine, a refugee from Nazi Germany. Her last, Jessica on Her Own (1968) is centred on
a secondary modern day school.
Elfrida Vipont’s work included a sequence of five novels about an extended Quaker
family. In The Lark in the Morn (1948), Kit Haverard goes to ‘the great Quaker school for
girls at Heryot’. In a later book, Kit’s niece, Laura, fails to pass the 11+ examination for
the local grammar school, refuses to be sent to Heryot and settles in well at the nearby
secondary modern school for girls, where her acting talent flourishes. In both books
Elfrida Vipont, who won the Library Association Carnegie Medal for the second book in
this sequence, The Lark on the Wing (1950), uses their school experiences as an
important element in the careers of her central characters but their family and out of
school life are not excluded.
Antonia Forest’s sequence of novels about the Marlow family began with a school
story, Autumn Term (1948), in which 12-year-old twins, Nicola and Lawrie, arrive at
Kingscote, a traditional girls’ boarding school, in the wake of their four sisters, the
eldest of whom is head girl. The sequence includes three more school stories and five
352 SCHOOL STORIES