Ysenda Maxtone Graham

A strange (and strangely structured) little book that I was constantly sure wasn't quite working but which clearly was because I was deeply invested and didn't want to put it down. This is a portrait of a community centering around a church in a suburb of London, and it largely functions as a condemnation of the modern Church of England. Fascinating (and also really neat to have serendipitously read it very shortly after watching Wake Up Dead Man).

Enthralling account of life at a girls' boarding school, a foreign subject to me but one which will wash some readers away in waves of aching nostalgia/trauma. The author has interviewed numerous Old Girls and Very Old Girls, most a bit posh, and has a delicious way with deadpan anecdote and spinning atmosphere and narrative out of multiple voices. Also it's frequently hilarious. I wanted to buy about 20 copies and give one to all the funny clever women I knew who (boarding school or not) show more would surely recognise elements of their childhood in its pages. show less

Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham is exactly what I was looking for this week. As the title suggests, this is a non-fiction book about what it was like to attend a boarding school for girls from the years of 1939-79 (in the United Kingdom obviously). The author conducted numerous interviews of women who attended these school who recalled startlingly vivid memories (both ill and pleasant) of their time there. From what it was like to be show more separated from family at a young age (some incredibly young) to the traumatic recollections of the horrible food they were forced to eat to what really went on when a bunch of hormonal girls were kept sequestered without any boys in sight this is a book that is both informative and interesting. (It's also super funny.) I've read some fanciful stories about what it's like to live in a boarding school but never true accounts from the girls themselves about what actually went on behind those austere facades. (Seriously a ton of them were in manor houses and castles which makes me super jealous.) There are many similarities between the institutions and also some gargantuan differences. For instance, some of the places (Cheltenham for instance) were strict, highly academic, and the girls that left there were more likely to continue into higher education. Others were more practically minded (or obsessed with horses and sports) and the girls that left there were generally encouraged to go to secretarial college and then look for a husband almost immediately after entering the workforce. It's an eye-opening read about what it was like for these upper-crust girls who were sent away by their families and then suppressed by these same people into wanting less for themselves. I highly recommend this not only because it's extremely well-written and researched but also because it's so fascinating comparing it to the way young women of today are educated and their expectations after leaving school. 10/10 show less

"I have read stories about girls' boarding schools and they are nothing like what it is here"
By sally tarbox on 5 March 2017
Format: Hardcover
An utterly absorbing and entertaining book which I read in an afternoon. Using 1979 as her cut-off date - the start of the 'centrally-heated duvet age' - the author focusses on the 'last years of the boarding school Olden Days - the last gasp of the Victorian era, when the comfort and happiness of children were not at the top of the agenda.'

And so we show more read of dire food, excessive games sessions, chilblains, bullying... The author has interviewed many Old Girls - from convents, from schools with a strong academic ethos and from the many schools of the era whose main remit seems to have been to raise the children with others of good families, education being an unimportant matter.
But this is not a diatribe against boarding schools, as there are many happy memories too. And even the negatives, the author argues, worked to turn out a certain sort of woman, one able to 'grasp the nettle strongly'.

Fascinating read - recommended. show less