The Naughtiest Girl in the School is the first book in a series of school story by Enid Blyton, first published in 1940. The main character is Elizabeth Allen, a spoilt only child who is shocked when she discovers she is to be sent away to boarding school and decides to get herself expelled. Despite all her determination, she is not sent home, and ends up enjoying school life.
Though the story is similar to Blyton’s other school series St. Clare’s and Malory Towers, the setting, Whyteleafe School, is a very different kind of school. It is coeducational and extremely “progressive”. The students hold a weekly meeting, presided over by a Head Boy, a Head Girl, and a group of Monitors, at which decisions are made and troublemakers are disciplined. The children only apply to the teachers when there is a problem they feel they cannot solve.
Though a student-run school might sound to some like a recipe for a cross between 1984 and Lord of the Flies, in The Naughtiest Girl in the School, it is used to emphasize the lessons which Elizabeth needs to learn. (For a very different view of “progressive school” in the era, see the beginning of C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, where Eustace and Jill have their lives made unbearable by the children at “Experiment House”.) As with Blyton’s other stories, a premium is played on getting on with communal life, sharing, and the favourite (if vague) expression having “your corners knocked off”. Selfishness and cowardliness are the two greatest crimes, both of which Elizabeth comes to suspect herself of, and vows to change.
The Naughtiest Girl in the School is very much a Blyton book in its style. The writing is not demanding, or even very interesting: Elizabeth always seems to express anger by stamping her foot, and the vocabulary is extremely limited. Adjectives and emotions rarely get further than “rude”, “jolly”, “queer”, “funny”, etc. Possibly because of the “progressive” setting, Whyteleafe School lacks the sense of place and the school ethos which St. Clare’s and Malory Towers provide.
Whatever its faults, though, The Naughtiest Girl in the School was sufficiently popular to cause Blyton to write two sequels, The Naughtiest Girl Again and The Naughtiest Girl Is A Monitor. In fact, their continued sales have warranted the copyright holders to commission six news books in the series from Anne Digby, the author of the Trebizon school stories. More than sixty years after it first opened, Whyteleafe School is still standing.
Jem Bloomfield - Jem Bloomfield was educated at the universities of Oxford and Exeter, and is currently working on a PhD on Webster's revenge tragedy "The ...
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