Boarding School Fictions: schoolgirls' own communities of learning

This article explores the fictional world of the schoolgirl annual in the interwar period and the significance of the imagined girls'-only spaces for their intended readership. The article takes the year 1929, the year of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, and focuses on two annuals designed for the 12–15 market: School Friend and Schoolgirls' Own. The annual compendium of stories, a very British invention, drew on characters whose adventures were followed in the weekly schoolgirl comics and was published at Christmas, a time when there was little personal space available as families gathered together. The imaginary world of boarding schools such as Cliff House or Morcove offered readers an escape from the hierarchy of family life and expectations of girls' participation in the home. Using the background of Woolf's feminist polemic and a framework informed by the theoretical framing of space by feminist geographer Linda McDowell, the article teases out the meaning of the multilayered nature of stories created by men with no experience of single-sex girls' school, writing as women.