ABSTRACT
British children’s literature criticism has gone through several different phases from its bibliographical beginnings between the wars to its status as a respected academic discipline, but its attitude to girls’ school stories has remained remarkably constant. With very few exceptions, girls’ school stories have been ignored, dismissed, ridiculed or despised by adult critics, whether teachers, librarians, or literary scholars. While Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tellers of Tales was the first critical study of writing for children, the first full-length work which encompassed girls’ school stories was Geoffrey Trease’s Tales Out of School. Trease, a distinguished writer for children, reflected the new critical concern with ‘quality’ in children’s books. Of the new approaches to children’s literature which emerged at this time, one was historical and contextual, aiming to look at the books as products of the time in which they were produced. Gillian Avery’s Childhood’s Pattern: A study of the heroes and heroines of children’s fiction 1770–1950 is a good example.
