found in Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House (1893), Mrs Molesworth’s The Carved
Lions (1895), in which Geraldine is sent to Green Bank, a small school of twenty to
thirty girls, while her brother goes to Rugby, and Pixie O’Shaughnassy (1903) by Mrs
George de Horne Vaizey. Most of these schools were established in ordinary houses in
urban surroundings, a far cry from the gracious stately homes and turreted castles
which later became the norm. The plot of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess
(1905) hangs on the fact that the school attended by Sara Crewe is situated in a house
in a London terrace. In all these books, however, school is just a small part of the
heroine’s experiences, and the authors of them were not attempting to write school
stories.
The first woman writer who can be compared to Talbot Baines Reed is L.T. Meade.
Like Baines Reed, she was a very prolific writer; she edited a magazine, Atlanta, and
wrote many kinds of fiction, but it was in her stories about girls at school that she found
the best outlet for her talents, and she paved the way for her twentieth-century
successors. At first glance, it is difficult to see why L.T.Meade is not regarded as the first
major writer and populariser of girls’ school stories, a role usually ascribed to Angela
Brazil; a closer examination of her work, however, shows that, although she uses some
of the plots and characters associated with the typical girls’ school story, there is a
difference between her work and that of the writers who flourished in the 1920s and
1930s. Although Lavender House in A World of Girls (1886), Briar Hall in A Madcap
(1904) and Fairbank in The School Favourite (1908) are similar to some of the small
schools created by Angela Brazil soon afterwards, Meade is much more concerned with
the moral development of her characters. The girls who belong to the secret society in
The School Favourite are bound by a code of honour which requires them to be obedient,
to work hard, to love each other and to do ‘a little deed of kindness to some one every day’.
In A World of Girls, although the heroine, Hester, is clever and hardworking and one of
the main themes is the prize essay competition, much of the story is taken up with
emotional relationships and with questions of honesty and truthfulness.
Evelyn Sharp’s The Making of a Schoolgirl (1897) shows the prevailing attitudes to girls’
schools, particularly those of the brothers whose sisters attended them, but it puts
much more emphasis on the fun side of school, with humorous and sometimes ironic
descriptions of school activities and academic achievement. Beverly Lyon Clark rightly
describes it as ‘brilliant’ (Clark 1989:6).
Between 1899 and 1927, a number of books set in boys’ schools, written for adults as
much as for children, gave a status to the school story for boys which has never been
enjoyed by that for girls. These were usually based on the author’s own schooldays and
included Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899), Horace Annesley Vachell’s The Hill
(1905) and P.G.Wodehouse’s Mike (1909); later, in the same style, came Alec Waugh’s
The Loom of Youth (1917) and Hugh Walpole’s Jeremy at Crale (1927). Of these, the most
famous is Stalky and Co., of which John Rowe Townsend says, ‘After the knowingness of
Stalky it was difficult ever again to assert the innocent values of the classical school
story’ (Townsend 1987:100). Kipling turns the traditional formula on its head: Stalky,
M’Turk and Beetle are three natural rebels who have no respect for the school spirit. The
irony is that while they are smoking, breaking bounds, collaborating on their prep and
generally setting themselves up against authority, they are clearly in the process of
TYPES AND GENRES 347