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Women's History Review

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‘Showing Them How’: the cultural

reproduction of ideas about
spinsterhood in interwar England
Katherine Holden
Published online: 19 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Katherine Holden (2011) ‘Showing Them How’: the cultural reproduction
of ideas about spinsterhood in interwar England, Women's History Review, 20:4, 663-672, DOI:
10.1080/09612025.2011.599628

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 Women’s History Review
Vol. 20, No. 4, September 2011, pp. 663–672

‘Showing Them How’: the cultural

reproduction of ideas about
Downloaded by [Temple University Libraries] at 08:43 13 November 2014

spinsterhood in interwar England

Katherine Holden

This article uses psychoanalytic theory to suggest how ideas about spinsterhood were
transmitted to young girls in mid-twentieth-century England, drawing upon chil-
dren’s fiction and women’s autobiographical writings. Spinster stereotypes were
often invoked in these sources to portray unmarried women as ‘bad’ maternal substi-
tutes in contrast to an exciting, adventurous masculine ‘other’. Spinsters in children’s
fiction could also be ‘good’ mothers, offering a place of safety in the absence of the birth
mother. Autobiographical stories bring out tensions in these representations. The
maternal spinster’s lack of a heterosexual partner raised concerns about emotional
dependence on the child. Conversely, the presence of a woman partner provoked
anxieties in some children and such partners often became the object of negative pro-
jections. These stories must be understood primarily as growing-up fantasies, reflect-
ing children’s contradictory feelings about dependence on adults and wishes to be in
control of their own lives.

Katherine Holden is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of
the West of England, Bristol, UK. She has been convenor of the UK Women’s History Network and is
co-chair of the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network. Her main research
interests are in the history of families with particular reference to marital status and singleness.
Her publications in this field include (1999) The Family Story: blood, contract and intimacy 1830–
1960, co-authored with Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle and Janet Fink (London: Longman);
(2005) Imaginary Widows: spinsters, marriage and the ‘lost generation’ in Britain after the Great
War’, Journal of Family History, 30(4) and (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: singleness in England
1914– 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Her current project is the history of
nannies in twentieth-century England. Correspondence to: Katherine Holden, Department of
History, Politics and Philosophy, University of the West of England, St Matthias Campus,
Oldbury Court Road, Fishponds, Bristol BS16 2JP, UK. Email: Katherine.Holden@uwe.ac.uk

ISSN 0961-2025 (print)/ISSN 1747-583X (online)/11/040663– 10 # 2011 Katherine Holden

DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2011.599628
 664 K. Holden

[When] a rich maiden aunt suddenly swoops down on your home like a wolf on
the fold—albeit a best-intentioned one—pointing out in a perfect tornado of
‘management’, that your mother being ill she requires looking after, and offering
to send you to a boarding school . . . you simply have to go and be grateful.1
This article considers how ideas about spinsterhood were transmitted to younger
generations of women in mid-twentieth-century England both through their
childhood reading and their experiences of being cared for by single women as
children. Drawing upon children’s fiction and childhood memories from
women’s autobiographical writings as sources, the study forms part of a wider
project on singleness in England in this period in which I make a strong case
for marital status to be regarded as a significant social, economic and cultural cat-
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egory of analysis.2
As I have argued in an earlier issue of this journal,3 there is still some conceptual
ground to be covered in the emerging field of singleness studies. This is necessary if
we are to understand why marital status has carried such a heavy weight of
meaning in so many cultures, and will give us a better foundation with which
to chart the social and economic consequences of marital categories for
women’s lived experience. This article takes a step in that direction by considering
how beliefs about lifelong singleness for women were transmitted to girl children
at a time when male emigration before and casualties during the Great War had
resulted in a particularly high number of unmarried older women in the
English population.4 It builds upon a body of work on single women in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which analyses beliefs about single
women, motherhood and maternal roles, but has less to say about the implications
for children of unmarried women’s widespread involvement in child care in this
period.5
My reason for looking at children’s fiction in order to examine this area is that I
was struck by how often unmarried aunts or foster mothers appeared as key adult
characters in books aimed at young people, and wondered what purpose they
served for the child reader. By linking these fictional accounts to autobiographical
stories we can also see how similar characterisations and narratives were used in
each genre to make sense of relationships which lay outside the nuclear family
norm. My use of psychoanalytic theory to analyse the narratives is based on the
premise that the stories which children find particularly compelling are those
which relate to both their inner world (fantasies and psychic formations) and
outer world (familial structures and significant people who surround them),
and that we therefore need to take account of conscious as well as unconscious
processes in examining material of this kind.
Freud’s essay, ‘Family Romances’, has been useful in this respect. Freud
suggested that in their daydreams children often reject their real mothers and
fathers and fantasise about having been born to other, usually rich and famous,
parents. Such fantasies played an important part, he believed, in helping them
deal with conflicts and difficult feelings about their families during their everyday
lives.6 Unmarried women in fiction were seldom such exalted figures, but the
 Women’s History Review 665

frequency with which they replaced parents or were the most significant adult
characters in stories suggests that they may have fulfilled a similar purpose and
that such images spoke strongly to childhood fantasies at this time.
Relationships outside the nuclear family had a particular salience in interwar
England, when the weight of expectation on mothers to fulfil all a child’s needs
was increasing. Indeed, both the theories of Freud, who focused on the Oedipal
drama and the importance of a core familial group of mother/father/child, and
those of his colleague Melanie Klein, who laid more emphasis on the mother/
child dyad, were themselves part of this trend.7 In practice, of course, these expec-
tations could not be fulfilled. In a society torn apart by war and economic
depression, the nuclear family core was unstable, and British colonial activities
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involved the dislocation and separation of many families.8 Mothers did not under-
take all the physical care of their children, and even if they did, could never always
be emotionally available.
John Hodgson in his study, Childhood in Autobiography and Fiction since 1940,
offers useful insights into non-parental relationships. He points to the ‘major
shifts in consciousness about the nature and significance of childhood during
the twentieth century’9 and draws upon both Freudian and Kleinian theory to
help us understand the place in autobiography and autobiographical fiction of
‘particularly significant others [who] taken collectively, provide the shaping and
nurturing experiences every child undergoes on the journey from dependence
to independence’.10 Although he foregrounds the parent – child dyad, he does
offer space for ‘other adults’,11 and several of his examples suggest that unmarried
women as nannies, servants, governesses or friends played an important part in
these autobiographical childhood journeys. My own analysis of these kinds of
relationships is less benign. I argue here that in fantasy and memory, anger and
grief about parental absence or unavailability could be displaced and projected
onto other women, who were often split into idealised or demonised figures.
Some of the women who were the recipients of these projections were unmar-
ried daughters who stayed at home in order to look after parents and were often
also expected to put financial, material, physical and emotional resources at the
disposal of nephews and nieces. In the nineteenth century, they were particularly
likely to have replaced mothers dying in childbirth and remained important in
long families where grandmothers had died by the time the youngest children
were born and were therefore unavailable to give care. And they were a significant
presence in colonial families who sent their children home from abroad to be edu-
cated.12 The high numbers of young women who did not marry in the late nine-
teenth century, when families were larger and marriage rates lower than after the
First World War, meant that unmarried aunts attached to families remained ubi-
quitous throughout the early and mid twentieth century.13 These women were
pitied and, despite the value of their labour both to families and in the labour
force, frequently dismissed and denigrated as ‘surplus’ or ‘superfluous’.
Yet this was not the only face of female singleness that women were exposed to
during the interwar years. In a period when marriage bars operated in many
occupations and most working-class and middle-class single women had to be
 666 K. Holden

self-supporting, for younger women the marital status divide appeared to mirror
the choice between staying at home as mothers or going out into the world of paid
employment. Thus the decision that women had to make between getting married
and pursuing a career was frequently discussed, and this is reflected in fiction
aimed at young girls.14 However, older unmarried women involved in child care
fitted neither of these models and were therefore perceived to be in an anomalous
position.
Representations of unmarried women as maternal substitutes were common in
children’s and adult fiction throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;15
however, their roles in girls’ fiction and autobiographical narratives from the 1920s
and 30s are of particular relevance here. I will argue that older, infertile women
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placed in a maternal position became the object of different kinds of splits

and projections. On the one hand, spinster stereotypes were invoked in order to
portray unmarried women as ‘bad’ maternal substitutes: dull, stern, restrictive
and controlling, in contrast to an exciting, adventurous masculine ‘other’ often
in the shape of a father or uncle having adventures abroad. On the other hand,
they could offer a place of safety in the absence of the birth mother and as such
were portrayed as idealised, nurturing figures who enabled younger women to
grow up and either become self-supporting, career women or to marry and
become mothers. Yet, as we shall see in autobiographical stories, there were also
tensions in these representations. The lack of a heterosexual partner meant that
the maternal spinster could also be perceived as a problematic figure who might
become emotionally dependent upon her relationship with the child. Equally,
the presence of another adult woman in the carer’s life provoked anxieties in
some children, and partners sometimes became the object of negative projections.

Schoolgirl Fictions
I begin by discussing school stories, a genre of fiction read principally by middle-
class girls and young women, which was a major commercial success throughout
the first half of the century.16 Yet paradoxically, although they were most often
written by middle-class unmarried women, Rosemary Auchmuty argues that
almost all novels for girls in this period ‘presented youth and marriage in a
favourable light while marginalising or ignoring old and unmarried people’.17
This suggests that despite their insider position, many of these authors were not
willing actively to challenge or reject the spinster stereotypes that were so
widely perpetuated in this period.18 This certainly seems to have been the case
for women who took on a parental role, often maiden aunts, who were routinely
viewed as unsatisfactory stand-ins for the mother. For example in Byron Lewis’s
Molly’s Chance (1926), as the quote at the start of this article suggests, aunts are
portrayed as restrictive, controlling figures, but they were also well-meaning out-
siders, hungering for affection. In this book aunts ‘don’t count’ and ‘never under-
stand’ and maintain Victorian standards of propriety, stopping one girl from
doing games and another from going on holiday with a much more exciting
and affectionate bachelor uncle.19
 Women’s History Review 667

A story by Angela Brazil, one of the best-known authors in this genre, creates
similar stereotypes. In The School at the Turrets (1935), Miss Martin, who is guar-
dian, aunt and teacher to Susie, prevents the child from seeing her father. But
because of her rather rigid disposition and her uncomfortable dual role, she is por-
trayed as an inadequate mother figure for her niece, resulting in tensions and mis-
understandings between them. The dull, worthy, strict Miss Martin is juxtaposed
against Susie’s absent father living in Australia, contrasting feminine/home/safety
with masculine/abroad/danger. And when Susie is asked, ‘Does Miss Martin ever
take you away?’ she replies with feeling, ‘No, thank goodness. The only person I
want is my Daddy’.20
Valerie Walkerdine draws upon Freud’s ‘Family Romances’ to demonstrate
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what purpose such representations might serve for girl readers. In her analysis
of 1980s’ British comics read by pre-adolescent girls, she noted the overwhelming
use of cruel ‘surrogate’ parents for girls who had been removed from their own
families in tragic circumstances.21 Looked at in this light, the use of an aunt to
stand in for the mother as a means to separate a girl from her father may have
provided a safe object on which the child could project her anger at having to
deny feelings for him which the incest taboo made it difficult for her to
express.22 Walkerdine argued that such representations could be helpful
‘because the fantasies created in the texts play upon wishes already present in
the lives of young girls’ which meant that the resolutions offered related to
their own desires.23
The demonisation of unmarried women, which is a common feature of many
fictional and non-fictional narratives (not only children’s fiction), can also be
related to the creation of two mother figures and the Kleinian idea of splitting.
Here the unacceptable feelings a child has about her real mother’s inability to
fulfil all her needs are projected onto a ‘bad’ substitute, leaving the image of the
‘good’ mother untarnished24 (often fictionalised in children’s stories as dead, ill
or abroad). Such devices allowed girls to fantasise, and play out in their imagin-
ations conflicting feelings about their own mothers. Because aunts and other
single women were so often used as surrogate parents, the common fictional
use of this role can be understood as reflecting reality for many children through-
out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet the significance of the frequency
with which they appear in girls’ fiction suggests also the ready availability of the
spinster image to stand for what is ‘other’ in women, to represent the part of
the mother which was in reality unavailable and had needs which conflicted
with those of her daughter.

Eleanor Graham: The Children Who Lived in a Barn

The ‘otherness’ of the spinster mother-substitute is even more apparent in another
popular book read mainly by girls but which falls outside the schoolgirl genre. The
author of The Children Who Lived in a Barn (1937), Eleanor Graham, herself
unmarried, was the founding editor of Puffin books and became a major influence
in children’s fiction from 1941 until her retirement in 1961. This book was given to
 668 K. Holden

me as a young girl in the early 1960s by my unmarried godmother, who was prob-
ably unaware of the cruel caricatures of spinsterhood it contained.
Parents are removed from the scene early in the narrative (they are missing, pre-
sumed dead in an air crash), allowing the children to have adventures on their
own. However, rather than deploying the ubiquitous maiden aunt as a carer, in
this story the children are left to fight the full force of the spinster stereotype
in the shape of the ‘district visitor’ (known as the DV) who is trying to get
them taken into care. Here the battle for the body and soul of the child is decisively
lost by a professional woman, appointed by the parish council to be in loco
parentis. The children, who are attempting to survive on their own in a barn,
are compelled to follow her dictates by the financial power she wields, but they
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remain implacably opposed to her in spirit. Miss Ruddle is characterised as:

thin and sharp featured and of a most interfering nature. The villagers hated her,
for she poked her nose inside their cottages and tried to discover things that
were nothing whatsoever to do with her. She had a passion for ‘showing
them how’. She showed them how to keep house, how to look after their chil-
dren . . . in fact there was no end to the things she showed them.25

Yet although Miss Ruddle has few redeeming features and remains firmly in the
position of the ‘bad mother’, paradoxically it is by standing up to her and resisting
her authority that the children are able to grow up and become much more self-
reliant than when they were living with their parents.

Noel Streatfeild: Ballet Shoes

Not all single women authors gave spinster carers such a negative press. The author of
Ballet Shoes (1936), Noel Streatfeild, like Graham and Brazil, remained unmarried and
also took a strong interest in her child readers. A prolific author of children’s fiction,
this was her most famous book, a best seller throughout the mid twentieth century
and the instigator of a genre of girls’ career novels.26 As in the other books, the
parents of the three girl heroines (Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil) are conspicuous
by their absence. The girls are adopted as babies by an eccentric professor who, like the
other male figures discussed, is also absent during almost the entire progress of the
book having adventures abroad. His niece Sylvia becomes a guardian to the Fossils
and enlists other unmarried women boarding in her house, including a nanny, a
cook, a housemaid, a dancing teacher and two retired university lecturers, to
support her in their upbringing and education. Each of these figures performs differ-
ent roles in relation to the girls and because they are from different classes and back-
grounds in some ways they maintain traditional domestic hierarchies. For example,
the servants never leave the household and appear to have no interests of their
own. However, their main function in the plot is to care for the children’s physical,
intellectual, mental and economic welfare, and collectively these women help
launch them into glamorous careers, enabling them to become independent and
self-supporting, while still maintaining the security of a home and family. These
women bear no resemblance to Miss Ruddle, but in some ways they have a similar
 Women’s History Review 669

function. Despite the middle-class class values that pervade this book, it is because
these women have to struggle financially to survive that they can instil a sense of inde-
pendence and self-reliance in their charges. For example in this scene the girls are
shown conspiring with their nanny to find the money to buy a new dress in order
for the eldest girl to go to an audition and move into the world of work. At the
same time they are trying to protect their poverty-stricken guardian Sylvia Brown
(known by the girls as Garnie) from financial worries:
‘Do you think Garnie has a little money?’ Posy suggested.
Pauline and Petrova answered together.
‘We can’t tell her, she mustn’t know.’
‘No’, Nana agreed, thinking of all the extra grey hairs in Sylvia’s head, and the
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hours spent working out accounts and how badly, even with the boarders’
money they worked out. ‘We mustn’t bother Miss Brown.’

Having decided to secretly sell their necklaces to buy the dress, the eldest child,
Pauline, asserts her new authority as wage earner:
You seem to forget that I’m going to an audition about a part. If I get it I shall
earn money. Probably by the time I am twelve I shall be keeping you all.27

This book, which prioritises female independence, gives little indication that the
girls might have a problem with being cared for by women outside the nuclear
family or being without a father. For Streatfeild, families did not have to be
nuclear or contain a male breadwinner to be functional. Rather, she depicted a
community of women as ‘good’ mother figures and who did not need men to
help the children in their care rise to fame and fortune in their chosen careers.

‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Mothers in Autobiography

Autobiographical stories, told by women whose unmarried aunts cared for them
as children, reproduce similar splits to those discussed in the books above. In cases
where more than one woman was involved, splits were made between two
maternal substitutes. Yet, perhaps because these stories were told with hindsight
from adult perspectives, the characters are less polarised than in children’s
fiction, showing a greater degree of ambivalence on the part of the narrator.
Jane Reid, whose parents left her with relatives in the 1930s and 40s when they
were in Sudan, found the strongest memories of her childhood related to her
unmarried aunts. In her autobiographical essay, she described one of these
aunts, Kate,28 who was her legal guardian as a ‘second mother’ and the most
important person in her life. The eldest of five children, Kate was ‘plain’ and
had spent her whole life as a daughter. The special charge she had of her niece
must, Jane believed, have made ‘a world of difference’. Kate’s lack of a husband
was viewed as having both positive and negative outcomes for their relationship.
While Jane appreciated her aunt’s love and care, she also experienced it as too
intense. But it was her other aunt, ‘Nelly’, nine years younger and better looking
than Kate, whom Jane had found particularly difficult.
 670 K. Holden

Nelly had prevailed upon her parents to be allowed to go out to work, but the
only job she was allowed was to become a Norland nanny where she would be
‘safely chaperoned in nice households’.29 She had a sadistic streak and used to
crunch Jane’s bones when washing her hands. Jane sensed that the children
Nelly looked after in her work were much more important than she was, a
belief confirmed by the fact that Nelly’s room was covered with pictures of her
charges but contained none of Jane. When Nelly went to Sudan, she ‘was entirely
unresponsive to the hordes of sex-starved young men who crowded around her’
and seemed concerned only with completing the knitting for the children in the
family she was to work for in Kenya. Yet she was not good with children. As
Jane commented, ‘she demanded love from them, and there is nothing that chil-
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dren shy away from more’.30

While the children in Ballet Shoes had no problem with their guardian’s conti-
nuing devotion to them, the main points of tension that emerge in this story were
the difficulty aunts had in leading lives outside the family and their over-identifi-
cation with children, while the lack of men in their lives was seen as intrinsically
problematic. Thus, although she knew that she came first with Auntie ‘Kate’ and
loved her, Jane found the idea that all her aunt wanted to do when she was old was
to live in a cottage near her a little unnerving.
My mother Joan and her younger sister Noreen had a similar experience. Their
adored aunt Lilla and her companion, Nona, whom they disliked, had cared for
them as children for three years while their parents were in India. Noreen later
voiced her feelings in her autobiography:
None of us liked Nona . . . She used to call us ‘dearie’ which made us cringe and
she had the most horrible rasping voice which hurt one’s ears. Although she
never in any way ill-treated us, in my eyes she would have been a good candidate
for ‘the wicked step-mother’.31

Given their feelings in this respect, Nona’s request to Joan that she should become
a replacement companion after Lilla’s death in the mid 1930s was particularly
unwelcome.
But how far Nona really did act like a wicked stepmother is more questionable.
Noreen’s tendency to split Lilla and Nona into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother figures may
have enabled her to endure her birth mother’s absence, but it also ignored the
importance of their relationship, a partnership whose validity she and Joan were
only able to recognise later in life.32 As an adult Joan kept in touch with Nona
and expressed pity for her loneliness, a state of ‘widowhood’ that could not
easily be publicly acknowledged.
∗∗∗

I have argued in this article that unmarried women both in fiction and autobio-
graphical stories often had to stand in for but could not always be ‘good
enough’ mothers and were often the recipients of idealised and negative projec-
tions. As liminal figures, both inside and outside families, these women
 Women’s History Review 671

represented the part of the mother who was not always available to the child and
which children needed to reject in order to grow up. This is more obvious in cases
where spinsters were represented as ‘bad’ substitute mothers, such as Miss Martin
and Miss Ruddle. Yet it is also arguable that the ‘good’ mothers in both genres of
writing performed a similar function; for example, Kate, whose niece Jane found
her devotion unnerving, and the Fossils’ guardian Sylvia, whom the children had
to support financially and protect from worry in order for the family to survive.
These images can also be understood as representing children’s desire for inde-
pendence and fear of their own vulnerability. In these stories the dependent pos-
ition is displaced onto spinsters, who are portrayed as loving but also as needy and
fragile. Thus, while not wishing to belittle the real difficulties experienced by some
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single women in this position, such imagery should not be seen simply as a reflec-
tion of reality. Rather, it can be understood as a growing-up fantasy reflecting chil-
dren’s contradictory feelings about dependence on adults and wishes to be in
control of their own lives.

Notes
[1] J. H. Byron Lewis (1926) Molly’s Chance (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons),
pp. 15 – 16.
[2] Katherine Holden (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: singleness in England 1914 – 1960
(Manchester: Manchester University Press).
[3] Katherine Holden, Amy Froide & June Hannam (2008) Winners or Losers?: single
women in history 1000 – 2000: Introduction, Women’s History Review, 17(3),
pp. 313 – 316.
[4] Holden, The Shadow of Marriage, chapter 2, pp. 25 – 52.
[5] See, for example, Eileen Yeo (2008) Virgin mothers negotiate the doctrine of
motherhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, in Rudolph Bell & Virginia Yans
(Eds) Women on their Own: interdisciplinary perspectives on being single (London:
Rutgers University Press), pp. 40 – 57; and Moira Martin (2008) Single Women
and Philanthropy: a case study of women’s associational life in Bristol, Women’s
History Review, 17(3), pp. 395– 417.
[6] Sigmund Freud (1909) Family Romances, in Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 9 (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of
Psychoanalysis).
[7] Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink & Katherine Holden (1999) The
Family Story: blood, contract and intimacy 1830 – 1960 (London: Longman).
[8] See Elizabeth Buettner (2004) Empire Families: Britons and late imperial India
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
[9] John Hodgson (1993) The Search for Self: childhood in autobiography and fiction since
1940 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), p. 13.
[10] Ibid., p. 55.
[11] Ibid., p. 51.
[12] Leonore Davidoff (2005) The Decline of the ‘Long’ Family: context and conse-
quences, paper presented at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 20
May 2005.
[13] This offers one answer to Nicola Humble’s question as to why mid-twentieth-
century novels focus on large families at a time when two children had become
 672 K. Holden

the norm. See Nicola Humble (2001) The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 150.
[14] Rosemary Auchmuty (1999) A World of Women: growing up in the girls’ schools story
(London: The Women’s Press). See, for example, the Dimsie series by Dorita Fairlie
Bruce, published between 1921 and 1941. A detailed discussion of this issue can be
found in my MA dissertation, Not the Marrying Kind?: images of single women in
England between the wars (University of Essex, 1991).
[15] Katherine Moore (1966) Cordial Relations: the maiden aunt in fact and fiction
(London: Heinemann).
[16] Rosemary Auchmuty (1992) A World of Girls: the appeal of the girls’ school story
(London, The Women’s Press), pp. 3 – 4. See also M. Cadogan & P. Craig (1976)
You’re a Brick Angela: a new look at girls’ fiction from 1839 – 1975 (London: Victor
Gollancz).
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[17] Auchmuty, A World of Women, p. 91.

[18] Shelia Jeffreys (1985) The Spinster and her Enemies: feminism and sexuality 1880 –
1930 (London: Pandora); Alison Oram (1992) Repressed and Thwarted, or Bearer
of the New World? The Spinster in Interwar Discourses, Women’s History Review,
1(3), pp. 413 – 434; Maroula Joannou (1995) ‘Ladies, Please Don’t Smash These
Windows’: women’s writing, feminist consciousness and social change, 1918 – 1939
(Oxford: Berg), chapter 3, pp. 77– 101.
[19] Lewis, Molly’s Chance, p. 53.
[20] Angela Brazil (1935) The School at the Turrets (London: Blackie & Sons), p. 65.
[21] Valerie Walkerdine (1990) Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso), p. 92.
[22] See Juliet Mitchell (1975) Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin),
pp. 370– 373, for a discussion of the incest taboo. The danger of those feelings
between father and daughter is shown in an earlier Brazil story, The Fortunes of
Phillipa (1907), where an intense father/daughter relationship is ended by the
girl’s removal to another household at the onset of adolescence.
[23] Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions, pp. 91 – 93.
[24] See Juliette Mitchell (Ed.) (1986) The Selected Melanie Klein (Harmondsworth:
Penguin).
[25] Eleanor Graham (1965) The Children Who Lived in a Barn (Harmondsworth:
Penguin), p. 54. The book’s popularity is suggested by the fact that it was reprinted
in the 1950s and 1960s.
[26] ‘Noel Streatfeild ’, in Humphrey Carpenter & Mari Prichard (Eds) (1984) The Oxford
Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
[27] Noel Streatfeild (1936) Ballet Shoes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 edition),
pp 110– 111.
[28] Names have been changed.
[29] Founded in 1892, Norland Nannies, now based in Bath, remains the most presti-
gious training college for nannies. Graduates command high salaries and students
still wear old-fashioned uniforms, including white gloves.
[30] Unpublished autobiography of Jane Reid, ‘A 1930s Childhood’ (1998), held by Jane
Reid. Reproduced by permission of the author.
[31] Unpublished autobiography of Noreen Torrey (1995), held by Noreen Torrey.
Reproduced by permission of the author.
[32] Ibid.; Interview with Joan Holden, 26 December, 1990.