A Lesbian Literary Trope: Boarding Schools, Underaged Girls, and Morality

The history of the trope, through Olivia by Dorothy Strachey & Thérèse et Isabelle by Violette Leduc

An aside: isn’t that cover gorgeous? It was designed by Milton Glaser, of the I♥️NY logo fame.

My grandparents were married to one another when she was fifteen, and he was twenty-five. For the place and era, it wasn’t considered too early, eg, Gandhi was married when he was thirteen and his wife fourteen. My grandmother was more educated than most women of the era as she had attended school and learned Sanskrit (what learning Latin might signify for a Westerner) as well as Hindi; my grandfather’s family had run a printing press for a few generations prior. “Married off” because in South Asian, Hindu culture at that time, and frequently but less so today, families arranged married between men and women. The family piece was important because an arranged married is considered the unification of two families moreso than love between two individuals. The bride and groom should theoretically have veto power, as Yashpal’s Jhoota Sach shows its readers, but with familial and social pressure, that veto power was unlikely exercised much.

Today, we would view marriage and relations between a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-five-year old as morally, completely wrong. My grandparents undoubtedly loved one another, had several children, and a strong relationship. When my grandfather died, my grandmother’s hair went from nearly black to grey in less than two weeks, in the time it takes to complete Hindu death rites, or antim sanskar (which it explained in greater detail in U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man). I can’t bring myself to condemn a relationship that child-me saw a model for a good one, and one that worked for the people involved. To start the marriage was the choice of neither, so can you hold my grandfather accountable? Or were my grandfather’s older brother (his parents were dead) and my grandmother’s father (her mother was dead) to blame, or was it societal norms and acceptability? A girl being unwed into her mid-twenties wouldn’t have been acceptable in that era.

The book that’s most famous for its underaged female protagonist is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955). It’s often misunderstood, as Nabokov intended it as the story of a monster. One theory is that Nabokov had been abused as a child or preteen, and he wrote the book as a way of exploring the thoughts of an abuser. Perhaps a little too well. In interviews, Nabokov had said that his intent was to show the wrongness of a girl being with an adult man. He spoke to his disapproval for underaged marriage, that it was morally wrong for a sixteen-year-old girl to marry a man of twenty-four, and he meant to call attention to that through showing the obviously wrong, an adult man and twelve-year-old girl. Through the novel, in small, subtle way, he alludes to Lolita’s sadness: her tears every night, her abuser threatening and scaring her with orphanages and their horrors, so that she felt she had no choice but to remain with him, that she wanted to make friends and do school activities, to be normal, and her abuser wouldn’t allow it. Even in the so-called seduction scene, when Lolita, who was still Dolores Haze, tells her abuser about “the game” she learned at summer camp, the scene some readers blame her for, he lies to her about not understanding nor playing the game, manipulates her, and she explicits calls it rape later. That so many readers miss or intentionally and maliciously misinterpret this novel speaks to those readers lack of empathy, decency, and reading comprehension over Nabokov’s skill as a writer.

The young girl discovering her sexuality through her crush on either a teacher or a peer at boarding school is a trope in lesbian fiction. In 1931’s Mädchen in Uniform, based on an earlier play by Christa Winsloe, a fourteen-year-old student falls in love with a teacher when the teacher kisses the student on the lips instead of giving her a good-night kiss on the forehead as was customary. It becomes a full-blown crush. Ultimately, the teacher and student are forbidden to speak to another, and the student is stopped from a suicide attempt. The crush remains unrequited. The student’s mother died when she was young, as did Red’s in Han Suyin’s Winter Love (making Red more susceptible to a predatory teacher), Metta’s mother was also dead in The Scorpion, and Therese’s parents were both dead before she was nineteen (barely of age to consent) in Patricia Highsmith’s Carol. Was Freud onto something in his theories about early sexuality and parents? Were the authors influenced by his theories? The longing for a mother who died too young is something non-fictional Constance Debré and Virginia Woolf experienced and touch upon in their writing. With that list of young female motherless characters, the reasoning underlying the trope feels more complex.

Olivia by Olivia (1949) is also about a student’s crush on her adult teacher. It was published as such by Hogarth Press in 1949, which had been started by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Virginia had passed, Leonard Woolf chose to publish it, and its true, anonymous author, Dorothy Strachey, dedicated it to the memory of “V.W.” For fifteen year prior to its publication, a copy of it lay in André Gide’s desk, as Strachey was his translator and trusted him to give her an honest opinion of the novel. Gide claimed to have not read it, but it also could have been that he was embarrassed by the effusiveness of the intense, dramatic, one-sided love Strachey depicts, embarrassed perhaps that it was a love letter to him. Another Andre, André Aciman praised it, saying he’d read it repeatedly and it inspired Call Me By Your Name, a gay male story about an adolescent’s longing and discovery of orientation.

On the surface, Olivia focused on a sixteen-year-old’s crush on her school mistress. Olivia has a mother, but her mother isn’t able to meet her spiritual, emotional, and artistic needs (as was true of Dorothy Strachey), so there’s still an element of needing something more from an older female role model. What the book recalls for me is the transition from the physical and sexual naïveté to adolescence. One day, Olivia is struck as she gazes upon her teacher, Mlle. Julie, with the realization that’s never been aware of a person’s appearance nor their beauty, the human realness of their eyes, skin, and hair in the way as that moment. That moment becomes the guide post for love and attraction for the rest of her life. She becomes unfocused, seeing the potential for requited love in the smallest sign, when Mlle. Julie says “us”, in her preparation for Mlle. Julie’s promise to bring her a sweet late one night, after a party. In an beautifully, exquisitely painful scene, Olivia changes from her high-necked nightgown into a bare-armed chemise, and waits…ponders every sound and footfall, heart-wrenchingly anxious until dawn alights. Who among us hasn’t known that type of longing and desperation? Olivia evokes it like nothing else I’ve read yet. Through Olivia’s crush, there is another drama: Mlle. Julie’s relationship with the co-founder of her school, the only person Mlle. Julie has ever loved, Mlle. Cara, comes to an end. Was it sexual? Perhaps. Mlle. Julie is based on Strachey’s teacher, Mlle. Marie Souvestre, also taught Eleanor Roosevelt (you may recognize Roosevelt in one of the other students in the book), who may have had a long-term affair with a woman, and Natalie Barney. Natalie Barney, famed for her sapphic salons and gatherings, had sapphic leanings since early childhood (something-something involving bathing as a kid), Mlle. Marie Souvestre’s school reinforced those leanings. Mlle. Marie Souvestre, may have had an affair with the real-life Mlle Cara, or so alleges a biographer of the Roosevelts¹. Romaine Brooks’, Natalie Barney’s long-term partner, first yearnings were for a pretty young (dead) nun, whose photo she found at the boarding-convent school she was at when was twelve, a photo she adored so much that she carried it around and slept with it under her pillow. A trope because it was a reality for many young lesbians of a certain classes in that era?

Also set in a boarding school is Thérèse et Isabelle (1966, trans 1967) by Violette Leduc. The earlier Mädchen and Olivia were about crushes and longing. Thérèse et Isabelle moves beyond the soft-glow cutaway, to sexuality between two girls of approximately the same age (I believe Isabelle may be a year or two older than the narrator, Thérèse) having a deeply sexual relationship. There is a lot of very elegant, French-sounding sex. The flyleaf describes it well (see attached photos), it is very much about obsessive longing and sex, overwrought promises of love and cruel withholdings, and there’s an undertone of cruelty and sadism about it.

Thérèse et Isabelle was originally written to be part of Leduc’s autobiographical Le Bâtarde (1964), it’s the underaged, homoerotic part. It takes place after Leduc’s mother married. Leduc’s mother had been a servant who became pregnant by her employer’s son, so Violette was an illegitimate child (hence the title of her autobiograph), mother and daughter had been close prior to the marriage, after which Violette was sent to boarding school.

Each of the books I touch upon in this piece were varying degrees of disturbing to read as an adult. I personally am of the opinion that people under the age of twenty-five or twenty-six (around the time the frontal cortex completes development) should not date or have relationships with folks that are much older than them. Yet, there are so many examples where my rule is too strict by far. My grandparents. What about Brigitte Macron, who met her now-husband, Emmanuel, when he was fifteen and she was thirty-nine, they are married and still together? I cannot think of others, but I’m certain they exist. I had friends from law school who dated when they were they, say, seventeen and eighteen, making the eighteen year old guilty of statutory rape under California law. Illegal, but few of us would say that was morally wrong in the way we might of Jane Delynn’s thirty-seven-year-old teacher’s seduction of sixteen-year-old student who had a crush on said teacher in In Thrall. Our laws assign a number to the legal ability to give consent, but individuals develop at different rates and have different life experiences. I’ve seen very few reviews question mid-thirties Carol dating nineteen year old Therese in Carol, yet I agree with Nabokov’s basic premise that the difference between a sixteen year old (Lynn in In Thrall, Olivia in Olivia) and a nineteen year old one emotionally isn’t as enormous as the law (in California) makes it out to be. Today, we, including me, tend to want to assign our moral values in ways that were different than the books of the 1930s through 1980s. We’re more sensitive to the moral question brought about by age gaps, that earlier era to the question of homosexuality. The boarding school trope is still showing up in lesbian literature today, eg, K Patrick’s Mrs S (2023), but the romance and longing are in that novel are between adult women: a teacher longing for the school’s headmaster’s wife.

1. Rowley, Hazel. Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage. 2010. p. 185. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.