ABSTRACT
Schoolgirls have long been associated with misery. Fritz Eichenberg's wood etching for the cover for Random House's 1943 edition of Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre, for instance, features a group of eighteen unhappy girls dressed in identical floor length black dresses. The miserable schoolgirl is a figure whose wounds, vulnerabilities, or viciousness are realized and inflicted in school and seems to confirm Virginia Woolf's observation that perhaps the only thing worse than being locked out of school is being locked in. This chapter considers graphic texts of girlhood in which fictional, miserable schoolgirls are employed to communicate the ongoing presence of trauma and/or to document violence experienced by real girls. It begins with the ghastly schoolgirls that attend British cartoonist Ronald Searle's St. Trinian's school to contextualize contemporary works, including Rebecca Chaperon's Eerie Dearies: 26 Ways to Miss School, Allen Say's Home of the Brave, and Carole Boston Weatherford's Birmingham, 1963.
