‘I am glad I am Irish through and through and through’

Abstract

Gillian Avery describes the ‘“Wild Irish Girl” who had to be broken in to a sedate English boarding school’ as ‘a favourite’ in the postwar school stories of the 1920s and 1930s.¹ This popular, endearing, and often comedic figure in twentieth-century school stories is influenced by the ‘Wild Irish Girls’ who populated girls’ books in the preceding decades. In particular, they owe a debt to the County Cork-born writer L.T. Meade (1844–1914), who published around 300 books across a number of genres and for a wide range of audiences over a 40-year career, but who was most famous as a writer for girls.² Meade was instrumental not only in popularising the ‘Wild Irish Girl’ figure in school stories such as Wild Kitty (1897) and The Rebel of the School (1902), but also in developing the market for girls’ books more generally. Sally Mitchell has written about the burgeoning of a separate girls’ culture in England at the end of the nineteenth century, which can be seen in the plethora of new books and magazines about and directed towards girls at this period.³ Meade’s books, and Meade herself, played a key role in the development of this girls’ culture: she was not only a prolific and bestselling author of girls’ books, but also a vocal contributor to ensuing debates about the value of such writing and about girls as readers.⁴