The Girls' Boarding School Story
St. Clare's, Malory Towers, The Chalet School, Trebizon...
The girls' school story survived scorn from literary critics and competition from series like Sweet Valley High, maintaining its place in our reading culture.
The British girls’ school story was an extremely unfashionable genre for a long time. Pillorying it as old-fashioned, out of touch with modern coeducation, promoting class inequality and even casual racism, critics had gladly buried rather than praised the girls’ school story. It represented attitudes and values which made many literary critics uncomfortable, such as Empire and class exclusivity. The books were also accused of being formulaic and undemanding.
There was undoubtedly some truth in these charges. Enid Blyton’s two series of books about St. Clare’s and Malory Towers follow extremely narrow plot patterns by means of pretty unimaginative prose. It seems unfair, however, to judge a genre on its most popular examples. Blyton didn’t contribute anything to the girls’ school story except to reduce it to a formula which took the line of least resistance to produce a large number of fairly bland books.
Meanwhile, boys’ school stories came under no such anathema. Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Eric were regarded as museum pieces, but the Jennings series by Anthony Buckeridge continued successfully, and the genre retained some of its old cachet as a portrait of British culture in miniature. The cultural standing of the girls’ and boy’s school stories is neatly highlighted by the parodies they attracted: the female version produced St. Trinian’s and strippers, whilst the male equivalent led to Willans and Searle’s anarchic classic Molesworth.
Despite the critical disdain and low standing, however, the girls school stories continued to sell long after they had stopped being written. Whilst Angela Brazil might not be top of the bestseller lists, Malory Towers, St. Clare’s and The Chalet School continued to justify their places on the shelves of the major bookstores.
In fact, they were such valuable intellectual property that Chorion, the company who holds the rights to Blyton’s work, employed Anne Digby and Pamela Cox to write new books in the St. Clare’s and Naughtiest Girl In the School series. Digby’s own Trebizon novels had been the last girls’ boarding school series to be really successful, but there were apparently more sales in new additions to the old series.
The genre also underwent an academic revision, with the work of literary critics such as Ju Gosling and Rosemary Auchmuty. Auchmuty’s book A World of Girls argued that school stories offered girls a female-centred imaginative space, with strong female role models and a sense of worth not dependent on male validation. Such models are obviously missing from series such as Sweet Valley High and the high school films which seem the nearest modern equivalent.
Though scorned by many literary critics, suffering from the competition, and apparently producing no new works, the girls’ school story maintains a presence in the modern fiction scene. What will happen to it now is anybody’s guess.
