This paper examines girls and power in British co-educational boarding school stories published from 1928 to 1958. While feminist scholars have hailed the girls’ school story as a site of potential resistance to constricting gender roles, the same can not be said of the co-educational school story. While the genres share many tropes and characterisation, the move from an all-female world to a co-educational setting allows the characters access to a narrower range of gender roles, and renders the female characters significantly less powerful. The disciplinary structures of the co-educational schools, mirroring those in real life, operate in a supposedly progressive manner that in fact removes girls from access to power.
