"You're nothing but a mean beast!": MARGARET MASTERMAN, Gentlemen's Daughters (1931)

"And now to finish," there was a throb in her voice, "let us put on the screen the patron of our Society, and show a picture of our gallant Prince." 

She retired with dignity into the darkness and tapped upon the floor. There was a click from the magic lantern and a gasp from the school; and Miss Blenkinsop turned round to meet the contented gaze of an aged cart-horse with his head half buried in his nose-bag.

It's a bit deceptive to use one of the only laugh-out-loud funny passages from a novel to introduce it. Gentlemen's Daughters, set at Redcliffe, a middling girls' boarding school that has only recently become aware of its own mediocrity, is actually a surprisingly quiet, subtle story interspersed with moments of levity. If I had been expecting a raucous comedy about school life by a resentful former student getting her own back, or a scandalous insight into the secret lives of schoolgirls, I would have been disappointed indeed. What I found instead was something perhaps less rollicking and crowd-pleasing overall but also more memorable and even touching.

As the story opens, Joan Roxton and her friends are meeting on the train back to Redcliffe for a new term. They find there a bit of a shakeup, with a new form mistress, Miss Jackson (soon known as Jakie), and more rigorous standards for their work. Jakie clearly has influence with the headmistress, and the school begins to buck up under her new ideas. She establishes a Girl Guide company, and Joan and some (but not all) of her friends are inspired and awestruck by her. Over time, however (the novel takes place over several years as Joan progresses through the school), she becomes a bit too eager to achieve glory and encourages her favorites, including Joan, to use her own history essays as models for their own—i.e. to copy them. 

The growing tension over the essays, as quiet as it is and interspersed with other day-to-day events, is the key turning point in the novel. Joan feels uneasy about it, but feels she can't question Jakie, and her friends are happy to be eased through their essay-writing difficulties. The scene in which Joan finally reaches a breaking point ("Miss Jackson, you're nothing but a mean beast!"), in large part because another, meeker girl has attempted to resist the cheating and been cowed into submission, is a satisfying and climactic moment, but what's most interesting about it is that it's not really an in-your-face kind of getting back at the villain scene. Jakie isn't a bad person, or even necessarily a bad teacher, and she really has greatly improved the school, but she is merely human and a bit narcissistic, and has allowed her ambitions for the school to cloud her judgment. Joan triumphs, with an essay she has written herself, and has crucially learned how to think for herself, but one might ironically say that she only triumphs because Jakie has taught her to how to, and in some way inspired her resistance. [Oh, these profound thoughts are hurting my head.]

This pivotal scene is only about halfway through the novel, and Joan's development continues with her unexpected advocacy for a girl who is a universal outcast in the school because she refuses to "play the game". That sounds very Chalet School, but it comes across with a bit more subtlety, as it gradually dons on Joan that the real world's standards aren't the same as the school's (her aunt meets this girl, Peggy, and immediately acclaims her the best of Joan's friends, when they aren't even quite, yet), and that she has the (exhilarating and terrifying) ability to make her own decisions.

Really, the entire novel reads much like an actual school story—particularly if one imagines it written by someone with the subtlety and sensitivity of, say, Josephine Elder. It's interesting to think why some books are marketed for adults and other for children. Possibly, Margaret Masterman's publisher just felt it was going to be a hard sell for schoolgirls—a quiet story about a girl learning to think for herself? No spies? Epidemics? No burning buildings, even? On the adult list then! And it would no doubt be an even harder sell today, with fewer possible readers who have experienced boarding school themselves. But it is a rather lovely little book.

And although there are indeed no burning buildings, there is perhaps the next best thing—a fire drill, the unique Redcliffe style of which is reported in one of Joan's letters home:

Last night we had a fire practice. In the middle of the night a bell rang and we thought we would pretend to be asleep. But the Worm woke us and banged on the door, and Buckie was making an awful noise on the gong, so we put on the light. Then Birds rushed up and said we mustn't do that because the light was supposed to have fused. So we went downstairs to the landing where there was a label marked Fire. Then the Worm said that was quite wrong because it was there the fire was raging. So we had to go upstairs again and down the other stairs to the hall, where names were read out in a thrilling voice, and all the staff were there in their dressing-gowns. Then we went to bed.

I enjoyed the book well enough to investigate Masterman's other two novels. The Grandmother (1934) seems to be a humorous tale of an eccentric family ruled over by a tyrannical matriarch, set in an English resort town. And in Death of a Friend (1938), Masterman appears to have turned to a more or less straightforward mystery, with a killer on the loose among a group of Friends and a gentle, elderly Quaker woman as her amateur detective (which certainly is an intriguing premise). Neither likely to be acquirable outside the British Library, but duly noted for whenever our next trip is…