I remember at least three boxes of them: cream-coloured spines, flaky, facing upward, hairline fractures running through red letters, making the titles barely readable. The Twins at St Clare’s. Malory Towers. Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall. The cream had once been white, the spines immaculate. It had been my mother who broke them during her preteens in the 1970s. Now, she had a daughter of her own, one who already worked through all her library books one week into the summer break. So out came the boxes, all attic dust and old paper smell, and I got to put all of her boarding school books on a shelf the length of my bed.
I devoured these books, folding them open along the fractures my mother inflicted. The formula was clear: go to boarding school in chapter one, come back home for summer in the last sentence. Of course, there’s always a problem: a mystery to be solved, a fear to overcome, and a girl who at first seemed an unbearable wench turns out to be quite friendly. Like the books, the characters’ lives were neatly structured: semester, winter break, semester, and a long summer in which nothing happened that could make it into a book until everyone reunited in the first chapter of the next one.
The protagonists were as interchangeable as their uniforms. Unruly, but with a big sense of justice. Pretty in a but-I-don’t-know-it kind of way. Smart, but not the smartest. Yet that summer I drenched myself in this formula. When I finished the whole shelf, it was the first day of school.
THÉRÈSE AND ISABELLE 1
I completely forgot about these books until I read Thérèse and Isabelle by Violette Leduc a few years ago. This deeply erotic novella about the love between two boarding school girls was intended as part of Leduc’s novel Ravages (1955), but her publisher cut it out. It was published on its own years later when Leduc had been successful with Le Batard (1964). Reading it, my brain recycled the floor plans of St Clare’s and Malory Towers that I had imagined years before, now populated by two horny and confused French girls who climb into each other’s bunk beds at night to stroke each other’s hair. In hindsight, it charged those childhood books with an eroticism I hadn’t identified at the time. There was absolutely zero hair-stroking going on in my mother’s boarding school books, but still.
There is of course the male gaze-y aspect of ponytails and school uniforms and stockings and pillow fights in dormitories. No parents around, raging hormones, it all adds to it – but that’s not what interests me. Moreso, there is confinement. Containment. A striving for order and uniformity, which is of course a recipe for rebellion. The ubiquity of rules begs for them to be broken. The more strictness, the more loaded with excitement every tiny bit of disobedience becomes. And there’s loneliness, isolatedness – and lonely people often craft deeply intense relationships with each other.
SWEET DAYS OF DISCIPLINE 2
Not long after reading Thérèse and Isabelle I read Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. Jaeggy writes in an even more exhilarating – honestly just wild and unsettling – fashion about an obsessive friendship between two girls at a Swiss boarding school. While Leduc’s portrayal of Thérèse and Isabelle is full of tenderness, Jaeggy’s character reflects on the past with a ruthlessness that is brimming with energy. Memories of her and Frederique sharing the same washbasin during bathing time, just to name one example, are presented as if she’s merely reconstructing. However, by trying so hard to ignore it, she makes the tension even more charged.
OLIVIA 3
Jaeggy and Leduc’s novels are part of a tradition of queer coming-of-age stories that take place at (boarding) schools, possibly the earliest ones being Claudine at School by Colette, published in 1900. The erotically charged adventures of Colette’s 15-year-old alter ego with her headmistress caused both scandal and big success. It acted as an inspiration for an icon of lesbian literature: Olivia, the only novel by Dorothy Bussy (a good friend of Virginia Woolf), published in 1949 and made into a blockbuster film one year later. Olivia has that same nostalgic way of retelling a story from the past, hardly disguising it as fiction. But in Olivia it’s not so much the seclusion that is central to the way the characters’ lives are shaped. Bussy portrays the school as a place of culture and knowledge, and the novel takes place at that all too familiar intersection of power, knowledge and desire – but in a sapphic way. Olivia is at that age where she wants to discover and absorb everything, and the book beautifully connects this hunger for the intellectual to a bodily hunger. In one of the most beautiful scenes, Olivia is reading a poem while her teacher strokes her hair and mouths the poem she is reading, engaging all senses – for the reader as well. Even writing this, I can almost feel breath down
my neck.
MRS. S 4
Even now, boarding schools continue to be appealing backdrops for queer stories. Last summer, Mrs. S by K Patrick was published, a poignant novel about a butch woman who has just taken on a job at an elite boarding school. The girls at the school appear as an amorphous (mostly homophobic) blob, referred to only as ‘the Girls.’ Contrary to most boarding school novels, the focus here is on the personnel of the institution. But even when no raging teen hormones are involved, the boarding school, with all its strictness, proves to be a fire hazard for the erotic, as the protagonist begins an electric affair with the headmaster’s wife.
ZILVER: OF HET VERLIES VAN DE ONSCHULD 5
An example in my own language is Zilver: of Het verlies van de onschuld (Silver: or The Loss of Innocence) by Adriaan van Dis, about a young boy named Zilver who is ashamed of his growing body, confused about his feelings for both girls and boys, and unsure of what to do with all of the life he feels rushing through his veins. When he starts to show interest in girls, his governess threatens to put him into an all-boys’ boarding school. But of course that doesn’t clear things up at all. His affection for his governess and the need for her approval run through all this like a tender but equally confusing force. It’s a beautiful coming-of-age story seen through the insecure yet wide-awake eyes of a bisexual teenage boy.
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE 6
The need for a role model is also a key factor in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. The story is about a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School of Girls, which is not a boarding school but might as well be, considering the almost cult-like grip Miss Jean Brodie has on her students’ lives. Miss Brodie is elegant, mysterious, eloquent – and, as it turns out, a tiny bit fascist. Her unusual approach to teaching, her beauty, the incredulous and all-too-personal stories she tells in her lessons – the ‘Brodie girls’ can’t help but be fascinated. It is not so much a queer desire in this case. It’s more about a desire to be Miss Brodie. Through elaborate fantasies about Miss Brodie and the only two male teachers in the school,
the girls develop and discover their own desires. I remember developing my sexuality in this kind of aspirational way as well: being more focused on beautiful women in movies, not because I desired them but because I desired to be them. In that way, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie lightly touches on the idea that women’s sexuality is often built – unwillingly – around self-objectification: looking at themselves and other women through the eyes of men.
THE VIRGINS 7
The Virgins by Pamela Erens is a boarding school novel told through the eyes of a man. It is the story of a boy and a girl at a boarding school in the 1970s, but from the perspective of their friend Bruce looking back on it years later. It is clear Bruce was, or still is, jealous of the frivolous freedom the couple felt exploring themselves and each other back then. Additionally, the book is full of scenes he couldn’t possibly have witnessed, which makes him an unreliable narrator. As a reader, you’re constantly assessing: is there truth to this, or is he fantasising? You’re stuck in his brain, looking at the world through his eyes. He’s watching the couple as a voyeur, and
by keeping on reading you keep on watching them too.
NEVER LET ME GO 8
This kind of play between writer, narrator and reader reminds me of one of my favourite novels, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s a book I keep coming back to for its deep humanity, and because it reminds me of the beauty of reading. Hailsham is not your average boarding school, and Never Let Me Go is not your classic boarding school novel. Its storyline spans years, for starters, and the characters are past their pubescent years; they have a confusing relationship with their bodies and a romantic attachment for other reasons that I can’t elaborate on without spoiling the plot. For some time, the reader is left in the dark about what is going on, which keeps you on your toes, but as the novel progresses a bond forms between reader and writer that the narrator knows nothing about. This intimacy, residing in all these different minds all at once, is to me the reason I started reading and never stopped.