School story
While examples do exist in other countries, it is most commonly set in English boarding schools and mostly written in girls' and boys' subgenres, reflecting the single-sex education typical until the 1950s.
More recently it has seen a revival with the success of the Harry Potter series, which uses many plot motifs commonly found in the traditional school story.
It is perhaps the most famous of all such tales, and its popularity helped firmly establish the genre, which rapidly expanded in the decades to follow across thousands of novels.
[8] Talbot Baines Reed wrote a number of school stories in the 1880s, and contributed considerably to shaping the genre, taking inspiration from Thomas Hughes.
While seated in Baines Reed's Christian values, The Fifth Form at St Dominic's showed a leaning away from the school story as instructional moral literature for children, with a greater focus on the pupils and a defined plot.
L. T. Meade, who also wrote historical novels and was a magazine editor, become the most popular writer of girls' school stories in the final decade of the nineteenth century.
[11] Most literature for girls at the turn of the twentieth century focused on the value of self-sacrifice, moral virtues, dignity and aspiring to finding a proper position in societal order.
This was to a large extent changed by the publication of Angela Brazil's girls school stories in the early twentieth century, which featured energetic characters who challenged authority, played pranks, and lived in their own youthful world in which adult concerns were sidelined.
Coeducational schools for all British schoolchildren were being funded by the public purse; critics, librarians and educational specialists became interested in creating a more modern curriculum and tended to see stories of this type as outdated and irrelevant.
The Bannerdale series of five novels (1949–56) by Geoffrey Trease, starting with No Boats on Bannermere, involved two male and two female pupils of day schools in the Lake District, and a widowed mother.
Some American classic children's novels also relate to the genre, including What Katy Did at School (1873) by Susan Coolidge, Little Men (1871) by Louisa May Alcott, Betsy-Tacy (1940) by Maud Hart Lovelace, and Little Town on the Prairie (1941) by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
In France, Mémoires d'Un Collégien (1882) by André Laurie (Jean-François Paschal Grousset), set in a boarding-school context similar to Talbot Baines Reed's St. Dominic's in England and Arthur Stanwood Pier's St. Timothy's in America,[15] would have a considerable influence on French stories in the genre.
Writers for girls include Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton, Elinor Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Mary Gervaise and Elsie Oxenham.
