The English girls' school story

Girls school stories are dangerous; they change lives. So claims Judith Humphrey, who combines wry wit and rigorous scholarship in her wide-ranging exploration of the phenomenon of the English girls' school story and its continuing popularity with adult women. She argues convincingly that this seemingly innocuous and conformist genre bristles with subversive messages that normalise strong, proactive and intelligent women in a society that has preferred them to be quite otherwise. In this female world, women, framed by society as lacking and incomplete without men, quietly assume themselves to be whole and slip without question or contest into all positions of authority, even, as Dr Humphrey persuasively argues in the chapter on spirituality, that of the all powerful godhead. Replete with examples and quotations from the school stories themselves, this book, though academically challenging, is often funny. Crucially, it portrays a world in which girls and women are happy, loving and free a world that is still evolving in the Internet fan fiction that reworks its themes and recreates its community. Girls school stories have long been dismissed as formulaic third-rate literature. Judith Humphrey claims that, on the contrary, they are sites of empowerment, and this book explains their significance in the body of children's literature as well as their importance in the lives of many women.