Boarding Schools

[rachelmanija]

This week iknowcommawrite, osprey-archer, and littlerhymes all posted on Malory Towers, one of Enid Blyton's boarding school series. (scioscribe also posted on Enid Blyton and naked tennis.)

Poll #21998

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 72

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The best part of boarding school is...

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Midnight feasts
33 (47.8%)

Sports
2 (2.9%)

An ocean swimming pool
18 (26.1%)

Pranks
7 (10.1%)

Spanking and caning
4 (5.8%)

Getting a good education
8 (11.6%)

Everyone is a girl
28 (40.6%)

Everyone is a boy
9 (13.0%)

Magic
25 (36.2%)

Something else which I will explain in comments
6 (8.7%)

My favorite non-magical boarding school is...

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Malory Towers
17 (32.7%)

St. Clare's
6 (11.5%)

The Chalet School
12 (23.1%)

Rugby School
0 (0.0%)

Kingscote
8 (15.4%)

Another which I will name in comments
14 (26.9%)

My favorite magical boarding school is...

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Hogwarts
34 (57.6%)

Roke
11 (18.6%)

Brakebills
10 (16.9%)

Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children
6 (10.2%)

Vampire Academy
1 (1.7%)

Some other which I will name in comments
10 (16.9%)

The Worst Ever Boarding School is...

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The one in Jane Eyre
40 (70.2%)

The one in Skin Hunger
5 (8.8%)

The one in Prep
4 (7.0%)

Some other which I will name in comments
8 (14.0%)

Comments

[liv]

Worst boarding school: the one in Lord of the Flies, which admittedly is mostly in the background rather than on the page. Failing that, the Fulcrum in the Broken Earth trilogy, or possibly the Enders Game Battle School.

[sartorias]

Favorite thing, social interaction, though pranks is up there.

Wrykyn (favorite school, thanks to Wodehouse), or else the school in Antonia Fraser

L.T. Meade was the writer who was writing girls' school stories while girls' schools were being invented. So the schools she writes about are radically different.

[rachelmanija]

I didn't know Broken Earth had a boarding school. What's so awful about it?

[rachelmanija]

Kingscote is Antonia Fraser's school.

What are Meade's schools like?

[sartorias]

Various types of schools run by one woman, or several (a la Charlotte Bronte), plus one at a school that was very like Girton. Some are small and poor, some are for the wealthy. The variety of schools is wide, the types of girls can vary, except she always seems to have a wild Irish girl . . .

[scioscribe]

The school in Prep is sort of unpleasantly claustrophobic in its privilege, but I do have a soft spot for the neurotically granular look at its social interactions. It's probably uncomfortably close to what I was like internally as a teenager, though hopefully I didn't come across that way.

It's not a traditional school story, but I still love the intensity and f/f potential of Frost in May. Plus, the Convent of Five Wounds is a great school name.

[larryhammer]

Angela Brazil, a founder of the genre, rarely repeated her setting, but every boarding school I read, I can't help but think "that's almost as good as one of Brazil's".

Favorite magical boarding school is Greenlaw from A College of Magics.

[larryhammer]

Sounds a lot like Angela Brazil's range of schools, writing very slightly later.

[musesfool]

I haven't read most of these books so I can't comment, but I do love St. Hadrian's in the DC comicsverse, because it is an all girls boarding school that is really a school for training high school girls as ASSASSINS.

[sartorias]

Not quite--though the influence Meade had on her is evident in Brazil's work.

[rachelmanija]

NICE.

[landofnowhere]

Oh, yeah, that's a good one!

[hamsterwoman]

Oooh, yeah, the Fulcrum is an excellent choice. (I mean, Battle School is too. But Fulcrum takes the cake for me.)

[rachelmanija]

What is the Fulcrum? I'm not planning on reading it so I don't care about spoilers.

[cyphomandra]

I read Frost in May for the first time when I was young and obsessed with fictional boarding schools, and although I loved it it made me appreciate the need for an outside world! I didn’t like the sequels as much.

[st_aurafina]

I quite liked the Trebizon books, they were like Enid Blyton but a bit more contemporary. There were boyfriends, I think? Someone had a period one time even?

But seriously, Clarissa/Bill forever. <3 (And all those pony books that were boarding school adjacent - like girls run a stable that caters to the local boarding school, girls go off to pony club camp for the summer and it's got a boarding school vibe? So good.)

[ursula]

You left out Miss Minchin's School for Girls from A Little Princess, as well as the school in Witch Week.

[rachelmanija]

Oh, yes, both classics. Worms in custard!

[cyphomandra]

My favourite thing about boarding school stories is character interaction/development, plus the possibility of totally bizarre plot developments. I love Antonia Forest’s Kingscote for the former, but I have a soft spot for books with the latter - St Brenda’s Headache (Anne Saunders) has a girl who has Taken the Blame for another character and is punished/misjudged for it, plus bonus amnesia, robbery and blackmail, and there’s a boys boarding school that I like a lot (unfortunately it’s called Feversham’s Fag and thus joins a number of fantasy novels with rather busty covers in the category of books I can’t read on public transport). I also read one called Hoax of a Lifetime, which added drugging, kidnapping, threatening characters with a red hot poker and actually beating them with cricket bats (!) to liven up the plot.

[melannen]

1. according to grade school me, roommates. and never having to drive anywhere. including the library.

2. the one from "Dear Mom, Get Me Out Of Here" but nobody's heard of it, so I fall back on MacDonald Hall.

3. Wizatds' Hall. (Or maybe Casterbrook.) Roke is up there, though.

4. The Xavier School.

[osprey_archer]

MacDonald Hall ftw! Did you know they've made movies based on the books? They are not quiiiiiiite as perfect as the books, but they're doing their best.

[nyctanthes]

Worst ever boarding school: the one in Down a Dark Hall, by Lois Duncan. Prep is a runner up.

To take this survey way too literally.....Having been to boarding school...I'm not sure there is a "best" non-magical boarding school. :P But the best part is certainly - beyond the obvious, the education - the chance to be free of parents and to be with your friends, 24-7.

OTOH, it's high school. Who likes high school? That's why I voted for Brakebills. It's magical college/graduate school. Totally different animal.

[duskpeterson]

Favorite boarding school: Sherborne, where Evelyn Waugh would have gone if his older brother Alec hadn't been thrown out for a love affair with a fellow student. Alec Waugh promptly wrote a novel scourging the school, "The Loom of Youth."

Best part about boarding schools: romantic friendships.

[melannen]

I do! They've been on my to-watch list for a long time but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

[melannen]

Also the Time Lord Academy but I dunno if that counts as magical or non-magical. :p