Girls' Schools: the Literature of Women

From the finishing school to the convent to the women’s college, spaces of female education have long fascinated writers. More than just academic spaces, these are also unique worlds of friendship and exclusion, desire and alienation, community and social fracture, conformity and transgression. In this course, we will explore how women’s education has been imagined in novels, poetry, and film from the early modern period to the present. Beginning with competing visions of women’s education in early feminist and anti-feminist thought, we’ll go on to explore how imaginative writers from the nineteenth century to the present have envisioned the girls’ school as both a literary and a social space. What kinds of cultural fantasies attach to these spaces, and what narratives and social relationships do they enable? How are differences of class, race, sexuality, and religion negotiated within them? Do girls’ schools offer a world apart from society, or do they recreate and intensify outside social dynamics within their walls? Our exploration will take us across genres and media, including the Bildungsroman, the detective novel, the narrative poem, and the horror film. Readings will include works by Charlotte Brontë, Fleur Jaeggy, Jamaica Kincaid, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Sayers, Muriel Spark, Alfred Tennyson, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others.