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brief thoughts on the finishing school

i happened upon my copy of the finishing school in a tub of books at a goodwill outlet. the pretty binding, green leather with gold leaf tooling, caught my eye. it’s a beautiful book with marbled endpapers and godwin’s signature right before the frontispiece–this was a signed first edition printed for someone’s private library. and now that someone is me.

the finishing school is a novel about a 14 year old girl named justine who moves in with her aunt and cousin in the suburbs and becomes obsessed with an older woman, ursula, who lives down the road. and i mean obsessed obsessed. she spends most of her time longing for ursula, trying to come up with a way to impress her, or spending time with her. she even considers the possibility that her longing could be sexual in nature. that consideration is quickly shoved down.

the older justine, who narrates the book, alludes to a massive betrayal throughout the text. i thought that maybe this would be ursula revealing to justine that she had a female lover. i imagined her as an older lesbian mentor figure, helping justine accept herself and setting her up to navigate the 1950s as a queer woman. but (spoilers) the betrayal is that ursula is fucking the married farmer who lives next door (the male farmer, to be clear).

justine's reaction to this is a bit extreme, even given the time period. she never visits ursula again after observing her tryst with the farmer. it’s possible that her reaction is just the result of teenage melodrama, the shattering of her image of ursula as perfect and infalliable, moral disgust at sex out of wedlock, but i still think it makes the most sense in the context that justine is gay, extremely infatuated with ursula, and reeling with jealousy from her discovery.

as an aside, i wish the finishing school had been more grounded in its setting. we know it’s set in the fifties and justine is from the south. she should have all of these strict ideas about women’s roles shoved at her. she probably has ideas about race shaped by the adults around her. she should be aware of, maybe anxious about, the cold war, communism, spies. i didn’t notice any of these markers of the setting appearing. maybe it’s just because she’s a child and less grounded in reality and current events than an adult would be.

apart from those gripes, i enjoyed reading the finishing school. i found the relationships between women to be interesting/engaging. the worship of ursula by justin makes me think of the prime of miss jean brodie or the secret history (it’s interesting that i’m drawn to books with characters prone to putting others on a pedestal. hm). the jumps in time helped to maintain the suspense, and it was short enough that it didn’t drag–i finished in a day.

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