The English Girls’ School Story: Subversion and Challenge in a Traditional Conservative Literary Genre

This research monograph is an analysis of the English girls’ school-story, not mainly as an aspect of children’s literature, but as a genre which, despite the conservatism of the surface text, deeply challenges and subverts traditional societal constructs and provides images of liberation and self creation for girls and women. The work examines the alternative life-views, role - models and ‘possibilities of becoming’ offered by the texts. It also explains why they have assumed such an importance (as Orwell pointed out in regards the English boys’ school literature in the lives of boys and men) in the lives of so many adult women. Dr. Humphrey also discusses the effect of war, shortages, sport/games, imperial decline and evolving notions of love and passion in these texts. This is the one of the few studies that provides a wide ranging discussion on so many aspects of this subject and it speaks to the power and possibility of this often dismissed, predictable and risible literature as no other research work has done.