A World of Girls: The Appeal of the Girls' School Story

by Rosemary Auchmuty

In this lively and controversial book, first published in 1992, Rosemary Auchmuty takes a radical new look at this guilty delight, asking just why so many readers are addicted to the genre — and discovers a powerful world of independent young women living together without the dominating influence of men.
Taking a fascinating, indepth look at the Abbey books by Elsie Jeanette Oxenham, the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Nancy, Springdale and Dimsie stories, and Enid Blyton’s boarding school books, A World of Girls proves conclusively that they provided active role models and positive images for a massive readership of girls and women.

Genres: Nonfiction, School Stories, Literary Criticism, History, Books About Books

244 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

Professor Rosemary Auchmuty is described on the University of Reading's website as "A pioneer of women's studies and feminist legal studies in higher education in Britain." For three years she was the Associate Director of the AHRC Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, a joint enterprise between the Universities of Westminster, Keele and Kent, and is currently a professor at Reading Law School. In addition to her her legal studies, Auchmuty also researches and writes in the fields of women's history and children's literature, and was the co-founder of Bettany Press, a UK publisher specializing in girls' school stories.

Reviews

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Legal scholar and literary critic Rosemary Auchmuty examines the world of the British girls' school story in this slim volume, first published in 1992. Concentrating on four influential twentieth-century authors - Enid Blyton, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, and Elsie J. Oxenham - she argues that the true significance of the genre lies in its promotion of an all-female world, one in which young girls find support through female friendship, and inspiration through female guidance and teaching. She seeks to examine this fictional world, one in which "women's emotional and social energies are directed towards other women, and women's friendships are seen as positive, not destructive or competitive, and sufficient unto themselves." Topics discussed include: the Schoolgirl Code, and the ways it is inspired by and departs from the Schoolboy Code; issues of discipline, and the role of the peer group in enforcing it; the all important subject of friendship, and the related (and somewhat touchy) schoolgirl 'crush.' The personal back-stories of the four authors under consideration are also discussed, as is the purpose of educating girls. The author concludes that, contrary to the scorn heaped upon the girls' school story, this type of novel offers something positive and helpful, in the form of respite (however temporary) from a male-dominated world.

Although her analysis in A World of Girls: The Appeal of the Girls' School Story is mostly confined to the twentieth century, with a few brief forays into earlier Victorian examples, Auchmuty has named her book after L.T. Meade's 1886 novel, also entitled A World of Girls: The Story of a School . I found this significant, as my sole criticism of this otherwise excellent work is that the author seems to hold to the mistaken (albeit quite common) belief that "school stories were a Victorian creation." As someone who has researched early girls' school stories, in the pre-Victorian period - I presented a paper at conference once, on the influence of Sarah Fielding's 1749 The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy on girls' educational narratives from 1750 through 1825 - this canard is always one I always find off-putting. Early children's literature is an under-researched field, but whilst I understand that many scholars are lacking in knowledge of the area, the endless repetition of these kinds of half-truths - another example would be the idea that English children's literature began in the 18th century, with John Newbery - grows tiresome. Leaving that one issue aside, I found this book illuminating. Some of this same ground was covered in the front matter of Sue Sims and Hilary Clare's marvelous The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories , of which Rosemary Auchmuty was an editor, but it was good to see this particular interpretation more fully explored. I assume that the author expands upon the idea in her subsequent A World of Women: Growing Up in the Girls' School Story , which I hope to read in the future.

With the growth of Queer Studies, since the publication of this book, and the reinterpretation of many older children's books in the light of this new(ish) critical lens, I thought it was particularly welcome that Auchmuty lays out the history of how girls' school stories came to be associated with a homosexual environment, rather than a homosocial one. Current readers might be surprised to discover that the push to identify girls' school stories as homosexual in nature, something I also sometimes see from proponents of Queer Theory, actually first came in the early twentieth century, from those seeking to tear down women's spaces, and destroy their potential to create female independence. As the author states, "the sexualisation of women's friendships was a political gesture, intended to reinstate male power at a time when it has been under feminist attack." I thought this point was well made, as I find the sometimes willful misunderstanding of prior generations' homosocial friendships by current readers and scholars, and the insistence on assigning such relations a sexual component they often did not have, quite problematic.

All in all, A World of Girls: The Appeal of the Girls' School Story is an engaging, thought-provoking, and ultimately illuminating book, one I would not hesitate to recommend to readers interested in the girls' school story genre, and its social significance.

[Sherwood Smith]

A quick, interesting read, even though I have never even seen, much less read, anything by two the four authors Auchmuty delves into in her study of the long school stories series. Her four authors are Elsie Jeanette Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer, and Enid Blyton. I have read a couple of the Chalet school stories, thanks to Hallie, and Blyton's Mallory Towers books, aged paperbacks carefully preserved by a friend here, who first encountered them in India as a kid.

So, though I haven't read many of the series, I found the book enjoyable for the general discussion of school stories, and the specific delving into patterns of female relationships as demonstrated in the books over the years. I have read pretty much everything of L.T. Meade's that has been scanned and put up at Gutenberg, including the book the title is taken from, A World of Girls, and a great many others as I could find them.

Until very recently, about the only references I ever saw to girls' school stories were derisive comments in other contexts, usually representing the bottom of a hierarchical scale of taste and intelligence. As always, boys' school stories have been treated more seriously, even if they, too, are not left unscorned.

The thing I found interesting about Meade, who wrote prolifically during the late Victorian era (she died in 1914) is that her most frequent story pattern is the wild girl come among other girls for schooling, and at least on the surface, civilizing. Her wild heroines don't die of consumption; they compromise to a greater or lesser degree.

In this book, Auchmuty acknowledges the surface urge toward conformity and domesticity in the school stories, while exploring other patterns, most significantly a world in which girls and women are complete unto themselves, not requiring to bend their lives around men. Even the husbands of the girls grown up in certain stories are conveniences, rather than characters; the stories are all about the women and their friendships, and loves. A couple chapters look at what that 'love' entails, and how it was differently represented before WW II and after, when the rising science of psychology was putting pressure on writers and educators to direct girls toward heterosexual love as well as domesticity. In the Victorian days, there wasn't any question, going right up to post-WW I stories, in which we find a great many spinsters in fiction as well as in life, due to a generation of English young men buried in foreign soil.

What Auchmuty doesn't address to any great degree is just why girls loved these stories so deeply. She talks about heroines being central to loyal fans--dissecting the characters--but I think there is at least a book in that question alone.

Complete lists in the back.

[Cera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book on a whim (from Midnight Special in Santa Monica, an awesome independent bookstore now sadly closed) and read it with pleasure and excitement, as it was the first work of cultural literary criticism (if that's the term) I'd ever encountered. Auchmuty investigates the appeal of the British girls' school story that began in the 1890s and flourished between the wars, only to die a lingering death in the 50s and 60s. Her conclusion is that in their heydey the stories presented an escape from the reality of patriarchal society by envisioning worlds in which all actors are women; female teachers and students during the schooldays, and then as the girls grow older their husbands are acquired only to conveniently vanish to other continents, leaving them and their female friends to raise the children together. As lesbianism was "discovered" and categorised as deviant, the focus of the books shifted away from female community to stories of compulsory heterosexuality, and the earlier books had to be abridged for modern readers. I particularly liked Auchmuty's point that modern readings of these books for their "camp" value is only possible because the idea of female communities and strong relationships within them have been so thoroughly mocked and denigrated in the ensuing years.

I can't speak to the accuracy of Auchmuty's work, since most of the books she analyses aren't available to me, but on the whole she makes a convincing case. I wish she'd done more with her statements about pre-1928 visions of female relationships; what she said fit well with what I already knew, but I think she'd be more convincing if she presented a more complete picture of the historical context. Still, this is exactly the sort of book I would love to someday write, juicy analysis of certain examples of a genre used to explain why that genre is so popular with some readers.

[Bryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this at least twice and it was great each time!

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revisiting to re-acquaint myself with its material on female friendship, crushes, 'silly sentimentalism', etc in the girls' school story. Useful, although I have some quibbles with the theoretical approach, in fact come to think, is probably one of the stimuli for wanting to tease out the discourse of morbid emotional relationships between/among women from the sexological gender inversion model of lesbianism.

All the same, and in spite of the fact that she really only analyses the work of 4 writers (who, however, wrote long and much-loved series), I give this significant props for taking the genre seriously rather than as a source of campy amusement.