ABSTRACT
The question I want to address in this essay is, quite simply, why it is that the boarding-school story is now (and has been for the past century) such a popular form of reading for girls. M y purpose is to explore the meaning of the school story as a genre, the changes in that meaning since its inception, and its relationship to ideologies of female subjectivity. I shall argue that the pleasure which these stories offer has positive aspects which directly contravene the concept of femininity found in other forms of popular reading available to girls, but that this pleasure contains its own limits and contradictions. But first
I want to look at the ways in which schoolgirl fiction has more generally been perceived.
