35 Classic Boarding School Stories, Free to Read Online
Between about 1880 and 1930, the school story was as large a category in children's publishing as fantasy is now. Dormitories, midnight feasts, an unfair prefect, a scholarship girl among the rich ones, one dramatic rescue in the third act — the formula is instantly familiar because Enid Blyton and then J. K. Rowling inherited it whole, and it was already sixty years old when Blyton got to it.
Nearly all of it is public domain. Here are thirty-five in the free library, worth reading both for themselves and because you can watch the modern boarding-school novel being assembled in real time.
Angela Brazil, who defined the genre
Brazil wrote about fifty school stories and effectively invented the modern version: told from the girls' side, in their slang, with the adults pushed to the edges. Adults at the time complained her books were subversive, which they were — the pupils in a Brazil novel run their own society and the mistresses are weather.
Ten are here, and they are interchangeable in the best way. Any is a fine place to start.
- The Nicest Girl in the School — an early one, and the cleanest version of her formula.
- The Youngest Girl in the Fifth — a girl moved up a year, with everything that costs her socially.
- A Popular Schoolgirl
- The Luckiest Girl in the School — has an unexpected inheritance plot bolted onto the school year.
- For the Sake of the School — a Welsh setting and, unusually for her, a real ethical problem at the centre.
- The Madcap of the School — the rowdiest.
- The Princess of the School
- A Patriotic Schoolgirl — wartime, with the school doing war work. Interesting as a document.
- The Jolliest School of All — set in Italy, which lets her write travel writing inside a school story.
- A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl
L. T. Meade, who got there first
Meade was writing girls' school stories in the 1880s, before Brazil, and she is the darker writer of the two — her plots turn on genuine cruelty and genuine class friction rather than on a misunderstanding.
- A World of Girls: The Story of a School (1886) — the foundational one, and still the strongest. A school, a theft, and a wild half-Gypsy child the book treats with more sympathy than its era required.
- The Rebel of the School — Irish scholarship girls at an English school and a secret society. The class politics are right at the surface.
- A Modern Tomboy
- A Young Mutineer
- Red Rose and Tiger Lily
- The Children of Wilton Chase
- Light O' the Morning
- The Honorable Miss
The best of the American school stories
- Just Patty — Jean Webster, who wrote Daddy-Long-Legs, and this is the funnier book. Patty Wyatt at St. Ursula's, told as linked episodes of organised mischief. If you read one book on this page, read this one.
- The Varmint — Owen Johnson's Lawrenceville novel, and the American Tom Brown's Schooldays except better written. Dink Stover arrives, is hazed, and slowly becomes somebody. The dialogue is a hundred years old and still sounds like actual boys talking.
- Tabitha at Ivy Hall — a Western orphan sent east to school.
- Caps and Capers
- Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall and Hester's Counterpart — Jean K. Baird, both squarely in the genre.
Boys' school-and-sport series
The other half of the genre, and much more formulaic — these were produced to a schedule by syndicate writers.
- Fred Fenton on the Crew and Fred Fenton on the Track — school sport, one sport per volume.
- Dave Porter and His Rivals — Edward Stratemeyer, who went on to run the syndicate that produced Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.
- The Rover Boys on the Farm — the last days at Putnam Hall, and Stratemeyer's own biggest series.
- Hector's Inheritance — Horatio Alger doing a school story, which mostly means a disputed will.
The famous novels that are also school stories
Easy to forget these are set at school, and all four are better books than anything above.
- A Little Princess — Frances Hodgson Burnett. Miss Minchin's Select Seminary, and the attic chapters are as bleak as Victorian children's fiction gets. Its shorter first version is also here as Sara Crewe.
- Little Men — Louisa May Alcott. Jo runs a school at Plumfield, and it is a school built on a theory of education that Alcott's father actually tried.
- Jo's Boys — the same boys grown, and the last thing Alcott wrote.
- What Katy Did at School — Susan Coolidge, and the funniest of the Katy books.
Also, for the curious: The Boarding School, a set of improving conversations between a governess and her pupils from a century before the genre existed. Not enjoyable, and useful for seeing exactly what Brazil was reacting against.
One that is missing
Tom Brown's Schooldays is the book that started all of this and it is not in the library yet. If that is what you came for, The Varmint is the closest thing here and, honestly, the better novel.
All of it is free
Every book above is public domain and readable in your browser on BingeReaders, with nothing to install and no account needed to start. By author: Angela Brazil, L. T. Meade, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Edward Stratemeyer.
By shelf: 14 school stories, 16 more filed under schools and 12 boarding-school novels. And if it was the orphan-at-a-new-place feeling you wanted rather than the school itself, our books like Anne of Green Gables list covers that whole genre.