"Real World" Books: School Stories, Magazines, and Domestic Skills
and into which beneficial moral lessons might be inserted. Until the twentieth
century these stories were set at boarding schools, exclusive establishments for the
daughters of the well-to-do. Common themes reflect the restricted social sphere in
which the students interacted: deep friendships, transient enmity, cliques and exclusion, the
importance of social status, obedience and scholarship versus disobedience and indolence,
and relationships with teachers and other authority figures like the older girls.