i feel like there’s this huge unfulfilled niche in the Dark Academia thing (kill your darlings, the secret history, dead poets society etc) for stories about women???? like can we have rakish girls quoting sappho and anxious genius poet girls, bespectacled, frantically tapping away at typewriters? wild girls trying to start literary movements and being dragged down by their own hubris? innocent girls discovering love and sex and angela carter? cute girls in 60s looking school uniforms investigating ~mysterious happenings~? going to class the next day hungover and exchanging knowing glances? can we just have. the thing
I raided my bookshelves and came up with these:
The Chinese Garden (1962) by Rosemary Manning
“In a girls’ boarding school in the late 1920s, a world of iron-willed authority, frigid rooms, and forbidden friendships, sixteen-year-old Rachel struggles to find a place for herself. When a rebellious student introduces her to a mystical, secret part of the grounds, the ‘Chinese garden,’ Rachel becomes torn between this hidden world of sensuality and pleasure and the formidable, controlling headmistress who inspires Rachel’s intellectual growth.”
Miss Pym Disposes (1948) by Josephine Tey
“Miss Lucy Pym, a popular English psychologist, is guest lecturer at a physical training college. The year’s term is nearly over, and Miss Pym–inquisitive and observant–detects a furtiveness in the behavior of one student during a final exam. She prevents the girl from cheating by destroying her crib notes. But Miss Pym’s cover-up of one crime precipitates another–a fatal ‘accident’ that only her psychological theories can prove was really murder.”
Olivia (1949) by Olivia (aka Dorothy Strachey)
“Olivia is sixteen years old when she goes to Les Avons, a finishing school near Paris, run by two Mademoiselles. It is a place of few rules, of laughter and lively conversation–a welcome surprise for a reserved young English girl. But the gaiety and freedom of Les Avons is only surface deep and emotional liaisons and jealousies form the hidden curriculum. Very quickly Olivia too is caught up in its spell, overwhelmed by her increasing infatuation with Mademoiselle Julie. Here she describes the powerful allegiances and repressed desires which smoulder at this secluded school, and the intensity and desperation of adolescent love.”
Regiment of Women (1917) by Clemence Dane
“In a small English town, just before the Great War, battle rages over Alwynne Durand, an appealing but dangerously inexperienced young teacher. Two women struggle to win her love and loyalty: Elsbeth, her fiercely protective aunt, and the formidable Clare Hartill. A brilliantly charismatic teacher, feverishly adored, Clare’s power is great–her abuse of it greater. Greedy for love, but incapable of returning it, she compulsively destroys the affections of those she most needs.”
The Small Room (1961) by May Sarton
“Anxiously embarking on her first teaching job, Lucy Winter arrives at a New England women’s college and shortly finds herself in the thick of a crisis: she has discovered a dishonest act committed by a brilliant student who is the protegée of a powerful faculty member. How the central characters–students and teachers–react to the crisis, and what effect the scandal has on their personal and professional lives, are the central motifs of May Sarton’s sensitive, probing novel.”
Frost in May (1933) by Antonia White
“The Convent of the Five Wounds, where Nanda Grey is sent when she is nine, is on the edge of London–but in 1908 it is a world unto itself. For the young girls receiving a Catholic education behind its walls, religion is a nationality, conformity an entire way of life. In this intense, troubled atmosphere, passionate friendships are the only deviation. Nanda is thirteen, a normal, quick-witted, spirited girl, when, catastrophically, she breaks the rules and pays too large a price for her transgression.”
The Getting of Wisdom (1910) by Henry Handel Richardson (aka Ethel Richardson)
“Henry Handel Richardson’s novel is a coming-of-age story, set in turn-of-the-century Melbourne. When clever and imaginative Laura Rambotham leaves her home to attend a prestigious ladies’ college, she finds herself compromising her ideals in an effort to fit in. The Getting of Wisdom is a portrait of an artistic and unwieldy soul chafing against stuffy ordinariness, told with great empathy and passion.”
These recs are so relevant to my interests that I am 1) intensely grateful 2) astonished that I have not read them before, with the exception of Miss Pym Disposes.
Recent works I’ve read that fit this bill are:
Carol Goodman, The Lake of Dead Languages
Nayana Currimbhoy, Miss Timmins’ School for Girls
Elizabeth Hand’s Waking The Moon also has elements of this - the book is split in half between two time periods, and the first one is set at an arts college in the sixties.
I’d like to recommend Picnic at Hanging Rock too! it doesn’t have a lot to do with academia but it does take place at a girls college/boarding school(?)
Also Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a very contemporary female oriented academia book. I found it a lil’ stuffy though.
The Basic Eight is contemporary too, and is closely tied to the dark, adolescent themes of academia books, but i’m unsure of how “academic” it is.
