REVIEW: A Girl of the Fourth
Feb. 3rd, 2013 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllA Girl of the Fourth: A. M. Irvine Partridge
(Subtitled The Story of an Unpopular School-Girl)
With this book, the bar has been set for the worst and most lurid book that I’ll read this year, and I have to own I didn’t want to put it down. I had to, of course, because such is life, but it was a compelling and ridiculous read.
Julia Longhurst has been living with her Aunt Kate for the past few years, while her widowed father is busy being a judge in India. Aunt Kate and Julia’s governess have given up on the fourteen year old girl, and she is packed on a train, set for school with ‘a bad character’. It becomes apparent that Aunt Kate mistreated her niece, subjecting her to emotional abuse, giving her no reason to trust anyone and plenty of reason to think the worst of them.
Moreover, Miss Hamilton’s school is not a particularly good one (I don’t think the writer fully realised this). Julia, a pretty highly-strung character, is teased from the second she arrives in a way that you can see that someone who wasn’t used to it would hate. In fact, a lot of that ‘teasing’ is what would nowadays be called bullying. Julia responds very rudely but also turns down kinder overtures of friendship, making enemies left right and centre, including among the mistresses, who try to give a girl they suspect is intelligent and musical good advice. She can’t bring herself to trust them, and by the time she realises it was good advice, it is too late. She is known as Spitfire and Gunpowder by her classmates.
She shares a room with two girls I didn’t find abhorrent, Bessie and Olive, who make friendly gestures because they’re outgoing types, but even they give up after one too many snubs. The one girl Julia befriends is nine year old Nina, the ‘littlest girl at the school’, who, again, is subject to behaviour that would now be called bullying from her older sisters. The other fourth formers can’t abide Julia, who won’t play nice – although their idea of nice is to ignore discipline and privacy when it suits them, to lie for their friends and hate enemies ‘like poison’. Guilty of the last two act are Avis and Hilda, both general favourites.
Crisis comes over a school-wide essay-writing competition. And when I say crisis, I mean it – not only is English schoolgirls’ honour at stake, but we get panic attacks, disrupted school lessons, bootless fathers, running away from school and the threat of BRAIN FEVER. We also get a moral lesson that never dares to be explicitly Christian.
I am mean, but in introducing the prize competition that will make this an unforgettable term, Miss Hamilton, the head mistress says
it is impossible really to appreciate literature (perhaps one of the highest of all pleasures) unless you have literary tastes, and understand the difference between good and indifferent, well-written and badly-written books. (p 92-92)
I thought that this fell into the last category. I can live with the over use of adverbs, but I doubt anyone ever talked like these characters did. Moreover, the plotting is abysmal, and there’s an amazing lack of self-awareness about the writing. I thought that Miss Hamilton and most of her mistresses were clearly barely fit to be in charge of any young people, and although things like racism or the snobbishness (oh, Julia, I was more sympathetic towards you than Irvine wanted me to be, but you were such a snob) wouldn’t be seen as bad things, a lot of the girls’ behaviour made me wonder why one would want to be popular among this lot.
And yet, I did enjoy it, but in my own head-shaking way.
ETA: Googling threw up 1909 for the first publication of this, but callmemadam pointed out that The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories gives 1910 as the date, which seems about right, as nobody has a car.
(Subtitled The Story of an Unpopular School-Girl)
With this book, the bar has been set for the worst and most lurid book that I’ll read this year, and I have to own I didn’t want to put it down. I had to, of course, because such is life, but it was a compelling and ridiculous read.
Julia Longhurst has been living with her Aunt Kate for the past few years, while her widowed father is busy being a judge in India. Aunt Kate and Julia’s governess have given up on the fourteen year old girl, and she is packed on a train, set for school with ‘a bad character’. It becomes apparent that Aunt Kate mistreated her niece, subjecting her to emotional abuse, giving her no reason to trust anyone and plenty of reason to think the worst of them.
Moreover, Miss Hamilton’s school is not a particularly good one (I don’t think the writer fully realised this). Julia, a pretty highly-strung character, is teased from the second she arrives in a way that you can see that someone who wasn’t used to it would hate. In fact, a lot of that ‘teasing’ is what would nowadays be called bullying. Julia responds very rudely but also turns down kinder overtures of friendship, making enemies left right and centre, including among the mistresses, who try to give a girl they suspect is intelligent and musical good advice. She can’t bring herself to trust them, and by the time she realises it was good advice, it is too late. She is known as Spitfire and Gunpowder by her classmates.
She shares a room with two girls I didn’t find abhorrent, Bessie and Olive, who make friendly gestures because they’re outgoing types, but even they give up after one too many snubs. The one girl Julia befriends is nine year old Nina, the ‘littlest girl at the school’, who, again, is subject to behaviour that would now be called bullying from her older sisters. The other fourth formers can’t abide Julia, who won’t play nice – although their idea of nice is to ignore discipline and privacy when it suits them, to lie for their friends and hate enemies ‘like poison’. Guilty of the last two act are Avis and Hilda, both general favourites.
Crisis comes over a school-wide essay-writing competition. And when I say crisis, I mean it – not only is English schoolgirls’ honour at stake, but we get panic attacks, disrupted school lessons, bootless fathers, running away from school and the threat of BRAIN FEVER. We also get a moral lesson that never dares to be explicitly Christian.
I am mean, but in introducing the prize competition that will make this an unforgettable term, Miss Hamilton, the head mistress says
it is impossible really to appreciate literature (perhaps one of the highest of all pleasures) unless you have literary tastes, and understand the difference between good and indifferent, well-written and badly-written books. (p 92-92)
I thought that this fell into the last category. I can live with the over use of adverbs, but I doubt anyone ever talked like these characters did. Moreover, the plotting is abysmal, and there’s an amazing lack of self-awareness about the writing. I thought that Miss Hamilton and most of her mistresses were clearly barely fit to be in charge of any young people, and although things like racism or the snobbishness (oh, Julia, I was more sympathetic towards you than Irvine wanted me to be, but you were such a snob) wouldn’t be seen as bad things, a lot of the girls’ behaviour made me wonder why one would want to be popular among this lot.
And yet, I did enjoy it, but in my own head-shaking way.
ETA: Googling threw up 1909 for the first publication of this, but callmemadam pointed out that The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories gives 1910 as the date, which seems about right, as nobody has a car.
