Building upon the work of such scholars as Rosemary Auchmuty, who provides the foreword here, Judith Humphrey examines the subversive potential of the English girls' school story, a genre that has frequently been dismissed as trivial in scope, and of scant literary merit. Although often derided in the world of children's literature scholarship, and described as being akin to "pulp fiction," the girls' school story has been immensely successful, and continues to have its passionate advocates, even today. Humphrey argues that, as examples of texts "written by women for women about women," girls' school stories are inherently subversive, even when they seems to conform outwardly to fairly conservative social values. She draws upon Auchmuty's work, in such titles as A World of Girls: The Appeal of the Girls' School Story, in positing that the creation of an all-female world can be liberatory for the reader, and examines such topics as the validation of intellectual pursuits for women and girls, the importance of school sport as a means of challenging restrictions on female physical activity, the notion of 'playing the game' as a larger construct around which to organize one's entire life, and the headmistress as an example of female authority - even female divinity. Humphrey concludes with the statement that the school story affords women the opportunity to be whole: to value female friendship and love, to see themselves in the Divine, and to reject notions that they are biologically 'diseased,' or distinct from the norm...

I found The English Girls' School Story: Subversion and Challenge in a Traditional Conservative Literary Genre to be an excellent examination of its eponymous topic. I tracked it down for a paper I wrote in my masters course on two girls' school stories - one by Enid Blyton, the other by Dorita Fairlie Bruce - and I found it most useful. As mentioned, Judith Humphrey is building on previous scholarship here, particularly the work of Rosemary Auchmuty, but I liked the way in which she expanded some of Auchmuty's ideas, and the various lens - female friendship, female intellectual pursuits, female physical autonomy, female authority/divinity - she used to examined them. I also appreciated the fact that Humphrey drew in some earlier authors - in particular, late 19th / early 20th-century writer L.T. Meade - in her discussion, as Auchmuty's work focused almost exclusively on four popular 20th-century writers (Enid Blyton, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, and Elsie J. Oxenham). Humphrey also discusses Bruce and Blyton in her book, which was quite useful to me, in writing my paper. If I had any criticism to make of the book, it would be the fact that it doesn't stretch back far enough, in its analysis of the genre, giving scant attention to the earlier examples of the girls' school story, which predate Meade. If Victorian school stories opened up subversive spaces for girl and women readers, how much more so would earlier works, such as Sarah Fielding's 1749 The Governess, or, The Little Female Academy, which is widely considered the first English-language novel written explicitly for children. Given that this genre, which Humphrey (rightly) considers so subversive, it tied to the dawn of children's fiction in general, in the English-speaking world, that might have been something to explore.

Leaving that issue aside - and I confess to some bias, as I have also done research on Fielding's book, and its influence on girls' educational narratives from 1750-1820 - this is an excellent work, and one I would particularly recommend to scholars interested in the British girls' school story specifically, or in British children's fiction for girls. It was published in 2009, so I'm not sure how accurate its portrayal of the current state of children's literature scholarship is - I suspect that girls' fiction is not derided like it once was, given the explosion of studies and work done in the field - but it is still a relevant and important work, as it concerns its analysis of its source material. ( )