The New Girls

"I feel almost protective of Beth Gutcheon. People don’t read as much of her as they should. Every time I go into a bookshop, I go to the G section and see what might be kicking around, because it’s actually quite hard to get hold of her books. She wrote a novel called Still Missing , which was reissued a few years ago as part of Persephone Books’ initiative to republish books that had fallen out of print. Still Missing is a fast-paced thriller. I read it in two hours, and it just blew me away. I thought: ‘how come I’ve never heard of this author?’ The New Girls was her first novel. It’s about a group of five young women who go to an elite boarding school in Maine in 1960, and it follows their lives through high school and slightly beyond. It was a huge influence on my novel Belladonna , which is set in 1958. What I found really interesting about this book is that essentially these girls were the last of their generation, in the sense that they’re the last of this very privileged group of young women attending fancy finishing school. By the time they leave in 1964, that world doesn’t really exist any more. These girls go on to live through the Civil Rights movement, through Vietnam, through the pill, sexual liberation… all of this stuff is happening as a backdrop to their coming of age. And yet, because of their privilege, they’re insulated and protected from it. “It’s everything you want from a boarding school novel because it has this claustrophobic, elite group of young, pretty people struggling with their identity” So in a sense, it’s everything you want from a boarding school novel because it has this claustrophobic, elite group of young, pretty people struggling with their identity, yet they are completely ignorant and naïve, as yet untouched by a world that’s about to radically change the lives of everybody around them. Something about that dynamic I find really tantalising. We, as readers, are bringing our own understanding to the text as well. The book was published, I think, in the late seventies. It was written almost as a retrospective of the last group of these finishing school young ladies wearing little white gloves and thinking that they’re going to go off and become housewives and throw cocktail parties. Okay, that’s a bit dismissive. But that’s the general mood of their expectations. It’s quite a poignant book, but manages to do it without being too precious. It explores their relationship with sex, with drugs, with their families. One of them has an affair with an older man, one of them has an eating disorder. So it still manages to tackle some of the topics of adulthood. I haven’t read that, actually, but I’ve heard people describing this as a kind of counterpart to The Group. But there’s something that historical fiction can offer us, because we have that inbuilt perspective as readers. Structurally, we have knowledge that the characters don’t have. With The New Girls , we understand how fragile the girls are and how fragile that world is. There’s a tension there, because as a reader, you want to puncture it. But you also want to protect their innocence. It’s a good read, I recommend Beth Gutcheon. I’d love if more people would read her work."