After weeks and weeks spent obsessively learning about Emily Dickinson, I've now entered my "school stories" era! It began innocuously enough when I re-listened to old episodes of the wonderful "Slightly Foxed" podcast and happened on the one featuring Picnic at Hanging Rock and other boarding school narratives. It reminded me that I'd meant to explore this type of literature, so in I dove! (Thanks to Project Gutenberg and Faded Page, many of these novels are freely available; I've lost count of how many I've downloaded onto my trusty e-reader…)
Part of my interest stems from the fact that I spent the first two years of my secondary education as a day student at a small local girl's private school. Although operating very differently from what seems to be typical in English institutions of this sort — there were no "houses" and no head girl, for example — it had a profound impact of my intellectual future and left an indelible mark on my memory.
Since I'd heard about Angela Brazil (in a P.D. James novel, of all places), but had never read her work, I started with The New Girl at St Chad's. I can't say it has aged well at all… Its casual racism and xenophobia are truly shocking, and the segment where our young female protagonist, having run away, encounters not the slightest unsavoury attention from the men with whom she interacts, appears unconvincing to the modern reader. I'll most probably return to Brazil at a later date, but don't have very high expectations.
As I'd already read the first three Enid Blyton Malory Towers books, it seemed natural to move on to the last three: Upper Fourth at Malory Towers, In the Fifth at Malory Towers and Last Term at Malory Towers. I do like the series as a whole despite its repetitiveness and heavy-handed preachiness… but I really cannot stand Alicia and June and Gwendolyn Mary!
This may come across as strange, but I'm a big fan of silence. As I possess quite sensitive ears (my father jokes that I have "bionic hearing"), I often perceive sounds that occur in my environment as negative elements. My perspective was profoundly shaken by Catherine Clearwater memoirs, Cloistered: My Years as a Nun. I'd always felt a deep attraction towards silence and its nourishing, soothing aspects, without ever considering its potential for concealment and destruction. Reading about the suppression of natural, normal thoughts and reactions she describes as an integral part of her training, the bullying she personally experienced as well as the serious mental deteriorations she witnessed in some of her fellow sisters during her dozen years in a Carmelite monastery gave me chills. Thankfully, she was able to eventually leave this repressive environment, to build a quiet yet wholesome life out in the world. I wouldn't recommend this book to those triggered by mistreatment, but I certainly found it most enlightening. (And I've removed twenty-odd convent-related videos from my YouTube "watch later" list…)