Student Body

What is it about girls’ boarding schools, at least as seen in novels? In Antonia White’s Frost in May, the students’ spirits at the aptly named Convent of the Five Wounds are stifled by arbitrary power and everyday cruelties. But at least no one is murdered, which is what happens at Bath Ladies College, the steaming cauldron at the centre of Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath. The usual teenage angst and drama swirls, and a boarder named Paulie pushes the gender envelope with horrific results. There’s also a murder, this time of a Tutsi girl, in Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile. Set in a school in the Rwandan mountains in 1979, the story is a tragic prelude to the genocide of the 1990s. And, of course, there is Jane Eyre ’s Lowood, one of the first literary depictions — if not the first — of a girls’ boarding school. Amid a typhus outbreak that cuts the school’s population in half, Charlotte Brontë kills...