An Awfully Big Blog Adventure: The Book That Poured Out by Sheena Wilkinson

As I revealed last month, I’m shortly to publish my tenth novel. But First Term at Fernside, published by the O’Brien Press in September, is actually my eleventh published book, and it’s taking me right back to the first one.

In 2007 Friends in the Fourth, based on my PhD about girls’ school stories, was published by Bettany Press, a small, specialist publisher. Only a few hundred people bought that book, but it led directly to Fernside so I’ll always be glad of it, though at the time, having consigned my PhD to not-always-happy memory and being impatient to be published as a novelist, I found it a bit of a chore.

When my last book, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau, was published last year by HarperCollins, an interviewer in the Irish Times asked me: Your PhD was on girls’ school stories yet you’ve never written one. Why not? My response was: I’m fascinated by female spaces. My story “Let me be part of all this joy” (in Female Lines, New Island, 2017) is set in a 1920s girls’ school. There definitely is a girls’ school story in me: if any publisher reading this wants to commission one, I’m your woman!

Partly, this was a throwaway remark. But a little bit of me was sending out an idea into the universe to see what might happen… After all, I am a fiction writer: I have to believe in magic.

And what did happen was that, maybe three weeks later, Kunak McGann, Rights Director at the O’Brien Press, a very well-established and respected Irish publisher, emailed to say: We really enjoyed your recent interview in the Irish Times and were intrigued by your mention of a girls’ school story. We ... would be very interested to explore what you might do with a novel (or series, even?) set in a girls’ school ...

I replied 21 minutes later. By the next day I had Ideas, and a few days after that I more or less had my school, my main characters and my plot.

Writing a novel is never exactly easy but I can honestly say that First Term at Fernside is the most fun I have ever had writing a book. In many ways, it was the book that had been inside me for most of my life, since, aged six, I read my very first school story – First Term at Malory Towers, the gateway book for so many school story fans! The story poured out. I wanted contrasting main characters whose fates were linked, so Robin and Linnet are cousins, and initially incompatible. Robin is apparently the perfect schoolgirl – a sporty, popular all-rounder, but she’s hiding quite a lot of worry under her sensible demeanour. Linnet is sensitive and eccentric, desperately at sea in this world of noisy girls. I loved exploring how they each find their own way of being in a community which is mostly benign but which has its challenges.

And of course the writing had its challenges too: the story will be read by children born in the 2010s, but is set in 1925, right at the time when the girls’ school story craze was at its height. I needed to capture the attitudes and reality of that time – it’s very definitely historical fiction and is not pretending to be anything else – while allowing for the sensibilities of a different age.

I was also very aware of being steeped in the traditional girls’ school story and wanting to honour that tradition, without any suggestion of pastiche – rather as my 2014 novel Too Many Ponies had done with the pony book tradition.

What helped is that the school story has remained popular -- despite attempts by publishers and librarians throughout the twentieth century to outlaw what were often seen as elitist, trashy books, school stories just kept reinventing themselves. Fernside might well owe a lot to Malory Towers and the Chalet School, but it's by no means an outlier in 21st century children's fiction. Robin Steven's Murder Most Unladylike series; Elly Griffith's Justice books; Daisy May Johnson's How To Be books are all examples of recently-written books owing a lot to the school story tradition. Fernside isn't even O'Brien Press's only girls' school story -- earlier this year they published the wonderful TheTower Ghost by Natasha Mac a Bháird, set in a convent school in 1960s Donegal.

So in First Term at Fernside you’ll find everything you’d expect in a traditional girls’ school story – sports teams and after-lights-out adventures (though no midnight feasts!); friendship and feuds; mean matrons and marvellous mistresses, and a big mystery which the girls have to rely on their own resources to solve. But it’s very much a 2020s book too, with an emphasis on diversity, empathy and inclusion. And like all my books, especially my 1916-1921 Irish trilogy, it’s feminist, with its unapologetic emphasis on female experience. It can’t possibly be anything else: girls receiving secondary education in the 1920s was, by definition, feminist.

So here it is -- the book that poured out of me! I can't wait for people to read it and to discover -- or rediscover -- the joy of the girls' school story.