feather_ghyll (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
feather_ghyll) wrote2024-03-28 11:05 am
feather_ghyll) wrote2024-03-28 11:05 am
Entry tags:
- authors: g,
- discussion of girls' education,
- discussion: history of girls' stories,
- discussion: parenting,
- discussion: personal,
- discussion: reading,
- frances greenwood,
- genre: girl detective(s),
- genre: mystery,
- genre: school story(ies),
- overview: book,
- the extraordinary head girl,
- the extraordinary new girl
DISCUSSION/OVERVIEW: Boarding schools (real and fictional)
A few weeks ago after I heard a little of Charles Spencer’s book about the physical and sexual, not to mention emotional, abuse he suffered after having been sent to a boarding school at eight, as a result of which there has been a debate about the damage sending mainly upper class children away from home to such institutions can and does cause. Of course, modern day institutions would and do argue that safeguarding is higher on the agenda, so there’s less chance of sadists and paedophiles working there. (One would hope so!)
Really, the idea of my parents abandoning me for weeks at a time as a child is unthinkable. I don’t belong to the class that could afford it or would think it was the done thing, or whose antecedents all went. Are we on the cusp of thinking, ‘maybe it’s not been great for so many of our leaders over the years to have been abandoned children?’
But from the age of 8 and sooner, I was reading about boarding school life, as exotic for me as reading about life on a starship or encountering talking animals or elves and the like. As so many British children did (as so many children have in recent decades thanks to Harry Potter.) I’ve mainly read girls boarding school stories, which weren’t about ‘toughening up’ the future representatives of the British Empire, there’s little to no physical discipline, although there was a strain of preparing their helpmeets. But the school body was more important than the individual girl, sticking to its rules, written and unwritten. School life is sold as being ‘the time of their lives’, as a crucial part of developing a nervous young junior, through her madcap middle years, into a responsible senior, ready to become ‘a young lady’.
Of course, there’s always a question of how many boarding school writers actually went to one and are writing from experience. They were writing an entertaining, exciting version to appeal to children. The few modern ones have challenged me more by being set at a time when I lived. I’ve found explicitly Christian ones be a little more honest about some children’s misery, but usually the heroine learns to love hockey or heroically prove themselves to be a heroine and win a prize and all is well.
All that was in the background as I read Mary Todd’s Last Term by Frances Greenwood, the first boarding school story I’ve read in a while. It went down in my estimation as I read it (in one day.) Despite its title, the book’s real heroine is new girl Penelope ‘Pen’ Pond, whose father has suddenly decided to send her to Gulls’ Haunt School (brilliant name) with her older sister Alice. He’s decided to pull Pen out of the high school, where she’s been happy, because she reads too much ‘absurd detective stories’. It’s never noted when Alice started at the school, but she’s about to join the Sixth, and is a little worried, because all last year’s Sixth have left, so the Fifth are stepping up, and she’s not sure that Mary Todd will make a good head girl.
Very much the leader of her particular friends, Jean, Hope and Peggy, at 17, Mary hasn’t grown out of creating secret societies and breaking the rules. She divvies up the prefects’ responsibilities so that she and her chums are free of heavy duties, leaving sports to someone who’s never liked them, a lazybones is the fourth’s dormitory prefect while an officious girl is in charge during their prep. But there’s no real comeback, only some grumbling. However, newcomer Pen is curious and observant, and soon ‘on their track’. This gets her into trouble with the staff, and with her peers when she starts dropping hints about Mary. Pen is partly the conscience that Mary doesn’t want to listen to personified, although her abhorrence of sneaking and, as Mary points out, lack of proof, mean that she can’t report her. Eventually, Pen confides in big sister Alice, and Mary and co. go too far in their thrill seeking.
There are some unresolved ideas about class and snobbishness. Motherless Mary’s father made his money as a jam maker. The author lets the mistresses look down at this, although they take Mr Todd’s money and put Mary in positions of responsibility. Mary at one point seems like a bit of a socialist. Meanwhile one of the girls wants to go on the stage and secretly learns to tap dance, and the author seems to both respect the skill involved, but lets the respectable adults win on that one. There’s an equal ambivalence from the author and her characters towards Mary, who is respected for her courage, but was clearly bad for the school.
Really, the idea of my parents abandoning me for weeks at a time as a child is unthinkable. I don’t belong to the class that could afford it or would think it was the done thing, or whose antecedents all went. Are we on the cusp of thinking, ‘maybe it’s not been great for so many of our leaders over the years to have been abandoned children?’
But from the age of 8 and sooner, I was reading about boarding school life, as exotic for me as reading about life on a starship or encountering talking animals or elves and the like. As so many British children did (as so many children have in recent decades thanks to Harry Potter.) I’ve mainly read girls boarding school stories, which weren’t about ‘toughening up’ the future representatives of the British Empire, there’s little to no physical discipline, although there was a strain of preparing their helpmeets. But the school body was more important than the individual girl, sticking to its rules, written and unwritten. School life is sold as being ‘the time of their lives’, as a crucial part of developing a nervous young junior, through her madcap middle years, into a responsible senior, ready to become ‘a young lady’.
Of course, there’s always a question of how many boarding school writers actually went to one and are writing from experience. They were writing an entertaining, exciting version to appeal to children. The few modern ones have challenged me more by being set at a time when I lived. I’ve found explicitly Christian ones be a little more honest about some children’s misery, but usually the heroine learns to love hockey or heroically prove themselves to be a heroine and win a prize and all is well.
All that was in the background as I read Mary Todd’s Last Term by Frances Greenwood, the first boarding school story I’ve read in a while. It went down in my estimation as I read it (in one day.) Despite its title, the book’s real heroine is new girl Penelope ‘Pen’ Pond, whose father has suddenly decided to send her to Gulls’ Haunt School (brilliant name) with her older sister Alice. He’s decided to pull Pen out of the high school, where she’s been happy, because she reads too much ‘absurd detective stories’. It’s never noted when Alice started at the school, but she’s about to join the Sixth, and is a little worried, because all last year’s Sixth have left, so the Fifth are stepping up, and she’s not sure that Mary Todd will make a good head girl.
Very much the leader of her particular friends, Jean, Hope and Peggy, at 17, Mary hasn’t grown out of creating secret societies and breaking the rules. She divvies up the prefects’ responsibilities so that she and her chums are free of heavy duties, leaving sports to someone who’s never liked them, a lazybones is the fourth’s dormitory prefect while an officious girl is in charge during their prep. But there’s no real comeback, only some grumbling. However, newcomer Pen is curious and observant, and soon ‘on their track’. This gets her into trouble with the staff, and with her peers when she starts dropping hints about Mary. Pen is partly the conscience that Mary doesn’t want to listen to personified, although her abhorrence of sneaking and, as Mary points out, lack of proof, mean that she can’t report her. Eventually, Pen confides in big sister Alice, and Mary and co. go too far in their thrill seeking.
There are some unresolved ideas about class and snobbishness. Motherless Mary’s father made his money as a jam maker. The author lets the mistresses look down at this, although they take Mr Todd’s money and put Mary in positions of responsibility. Mary at one point seems like a bit of a socialist. Meanwhile one of the girls wants to go on the stage and secretly learns to tap dance, and the author seems to both respect the skill involved, but lets the respectable adults win on that one. There’s an equal ambivalence from the author and her characters towards Mary, who is respected for her courage, but was clearly bad for the school.