ABSTRACT
Attendance at school for some years between the ages of five and eighteen is a common experience, and one well within the comprehension of readers of children’s books. In Britain, the Education Act of 1870 marked the first official step towards education for all, but even before the schools catering for every level of society were being established in increasing numbers. Evelyn Sharp’s The Making of a Schoolgirl shows the prevailing attitudes to girls’ schools, particularly those of the brothers whose sisters attended them. Authors of children’s books elsewhere in the Anglo-Saxon world showed little interest in writing school stories: two of the exceptions are very different in spirit from the stories being published in Britain at the same period. Between 1978 and 1994, Ann Digby published fourteen titles about Rebecca Mason of Trebizon School, which constitute the most significant girls’ boarding school series to be published in Britain in the latter part of the twentieth century.
