Between Angela Brazil and Antonia White the girls' school story has floundered, contracted or gone off at a tangent. In its original form for children it was wonderfully susceptible to parody, as Arthur Marshall has shown on more than one occasion. Then, the school story was transformed into the detective story, in one of its most successful adaptations (Gladys Mitchell's St Peter's Finger is an example).

In straightforward fiction, schooldays generally constitute nothing more than an unmomentous phase in a character's past. An exception, of course, is Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, really in a class of its own, with its episodic structure, its ironic perspective, and the eccentricities of its central character. Antonia White, with Frost in May (1933) produced a piece of wholly serious, somewhat bleak and plaintive fiction about a convent boarding school; but it was a rare achievement. Religious narrowness helped; it is not easy to take a frivolous view of treatment so painful, even in recollection.

Generally, however, there is something ridiculous, out of proportion, in the regulations and priorities of the English girls' school. In literary terms, it is essential that the burning injustices, the thrilling transgressions, the makeshift passions should fall within