"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.
The Governess is an early novel written for an audience of
young readers, perhaps the earliest in English. Fielding herself
attended a boarding school, and her novel covers the activities
of a week, beginning with a very bad day on which the young
students fight hand to hand over a basket of apples. The
gentler Correspondence combines an epistolary account of a
student’s studies, entertainments, relationships, and jealousies
at her school with her mother’s loving moral advice. More
exciting is the Rebellious School Girl, where a student’s unkind
drawing of her vain teacher, Miss Frivol, sets in motion a story
of disobedience, punishment, false accusations of theft, broken
limbs, and the eventual triumph of justice.
Similarly, in The Girls of Cromer Hall, Betty is obnoxious, gets
expelled, causes trouble in her new school, responds to an
effective head girl, and shows signs of moral improvement.
Ironically, the best known novel about a girls’ school falls outside
the conventions of the genre. The story of Sarah Crewe, who
is orphaned and plummets from favored boarder to household
drudge, is an account of the plucky heroine overcoming tragedy,
rather than one of normal schoolgirl tribulations.
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Fielding, Sarah. The Governess, or, The Little Female Academy. London: Printed for
T. Clarke and F. Brookes, 1765.
Taylor, Ann Martin. Correspondence Between a Mother and Her Daughter at School.
London: Printed for John Taylor, 1829.
Hughs, Mary. The Rebellious School-Girl: A Tale. London (58, Holborn-hill): William
Darton, 1821.
Jacberns, Raymond, and Rosa C. Petherick. The Girls of Cromer Hall. London: Thomas
Nelson and Sons, 1920.
Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe, Now
Told for the First Time. London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1905.