The Naughtiest Girl in the School

Enid Blyton's The Naughtiest Girl in the School is a boarding school story for 9 year olds about a girl who arrives determined to get herself expelled.

What happens

Elizabeth Allen is an only child who has been given everything and told off for nothing. Six governesses have come and gone. The seventh has just handed in her notice after finding earwigs in her bed.

So her parents are sending her to Whyteleafe School, and Elizabeth announces her plan over breakfast. She will be so awful that they send her straight back home.

Then Miss Scott, the governess, says the one thing nobody has ever said to her. It is a dreadful thing not to have a single friend.

Elizabeth bursts into tears and goes anyway, still furious, still planning to be the worst girl in the place.

What makes this readable now is how entirely the book is on Elizabeth's side while showing her being unbearable. She is not a monster. She is lonely and proud and has worked out that being the naughtiest is at least a way of being somebody.

She also has genuinely good ideas about how to be annoying. Pinning two brown stockings toe to toe onto the governess's skirt, so they trail after her down the landing like a tail, is quite funny and you are allowed to think so.

Whyteleafe itself is the real surprise. There is barely any telling off from the staff. Instead the children hold a Meeting every week, with the head boy and girl sitting as judges and twelve elected monitors as the jury, and the children decide the punishments themselves. Elizabeth arrives with a plan to be sent home and runs straight into a school that will simply discuss her.

That is a much stranger, more interesting idea than most school stories have, and it is what keeps the book alive.

The values are of their time, mind. Being spoilt is treated as close to a moral failing, and most of the correcting happens through other children disapproving rather than anyone asking Elizabeth why she is like this.

If you've got a reader who enjoys watching somebody dig themselves a hole and then have to climb out of it, this is a good one. It also takes seriously how it feels to be sent away from home, which plenty of school stories skate over. Elizabeth's parents are going abroad for a whole year and the house will be shut up behind her.

There is no villain and nothing to save. Just a girl, a tuck box and a very bad plan.

What to read next

The Naughtiest Girl Again picks Elizabeth up a term later, packing her trunk and actually looking forward to going back. Watching her remember how she behaved last time is lovely, and somebody at school has not forgotten either.