Katharine Goes to School

by Winifred Darch, M.D. Johnston (Illustrator)

In this girls' school story from 1925, Katherine is boycotted because she is suspected of having stolen her rival's examination essay.

285 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

A prolific English children's author, primarily of girls' school stories, Winifred Darch was born in 1884 in Brighton, the daughter of schoolmaster, and then solicitor William Darch, and his wife Florence. She was educated at Lestonstone High School, and - finances not permitting a university education - in the teacher training program at the Cheltenham Ladies' College. From 1906-1935 Darch worked as a teacher and housemistress at the High School for Girls at Loughton, before taking early retirement in order to care for her parents. She lived in the family home in Ashington, Sussex, until her death in 1960.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raised by her widowed mother and an indulgent governess in her grandfather‘s stately home, Katharine is privileged, head-strong, and has a lop-sided education. Everything changes when her grandfather dies, and an uncle inherits his title and the house. The uncle's shrewish wife makes life unbearable for Katharine and her mother, who decamp to a cottage some distance away and live in drastically reduced circumstances (strong shades of Sense and Sensibility). Now Katharine must start school for the first time, at a relatively advanced age. Interestingly, Winifred, the head-girl of the local day school Katharine attends, is the daughter of a former cook of the grandfather’s household. Winifred is brilliant academically, but constrained in her manner towards Katharine, who finds the older girl stiff and boring and unforgivably authoritarian in her role as head-girl. Katharine falls in with a crowd of high-spirited girls who also find the prefects too strict, and is instrumental in forming a society of “Jacobites” for the purpose of ragging them. (Present-day readers will likely be dismayed that one of the girls eagerly suggests that they instead call themselves the Ku Klux Klan, but is voted down, not for the obvious reasons, but on the grounds that their aims are not “political.”) Rather typically, Darch sets up an interesting situation -- the socially uneasy relationship between Katharine and Winifred that points to the changing mores of the time the book was written (1925) -- and then largely ignores it in favor of focusing on a much more clichéd story line. The rivalry between Katharine and the KKK girl for the friendship of the devil-may-care charismatic ringleader of the Jacobites (unfortunately I no longer have the book to hand and have forgotten the names of both girls!) takes up most of the action, and Katharine undergoes trials of being falsely suspected of stealing, sneaking and cheating while struggling to win a desperately needed scholarship before all is resolved. Fairly typical grist for the girls' school story mill, but Darch is a better than average school story writer, and while I wouldn’t recommend her to anyone with no interest in the genre, I find her books quite enjoyable.