The Mis(s) Education of Young Women

Focus in this chapter rests on how neo-Victorian young adult narratives of girlhoods, and girl cultures in boarding-school books, examine and critique the socialisation of young people alongside ideas of “proper” femininity. Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy—A Great and Terrible Beauty (2003), Rebel Angels (2005), and The Sweet, Far Thing (2007)—features young female characters who are on a quest for agency and independence in a system that seeks to regulate their bodies and minds. It is only when they become aware of the social strictures that confine them that they begin to live more authentic lives. “Mis(s)education” suggests that these novels return to the nineteenth century to examine the role that extremely binarised gender roles play in both Victorian and contemporary conceptions of girlhood, and how young women must work to think beyond these ideologies.