School Days of a Methodist Lady: A journey through girlhood
In 1958, Jill left her home in the Victorian town of Kyabram to attend Methodist Ladies’ College (MLC) as a boarder. In this coming-of-age memoir she interleaves her MLC story with lively vignettes of her early school years, the family newsagency, church, and country community life. This is a deeply personal account of teenage struggles with parental and sibling relationships and with MLC’s discipline, study demands, tough living conditions and rigorous religious education. Jill’s daily life as a school boarder, her rebellions, emotional highs and lows, and encounters with Dr Wood, MLC’s charismatic principal and pastor, are described with honesty, hilarity and sharp critical insight.
Jill embarked on her memoir following the chance discovery of the letters that she and her sister had written from MLC fifty years ago:
I wanted to write a book about it: for MLC students, teachers and Old Collegians, to feed their sense of history and their remembrances; for other one-time school boarders; for young people struggling to grow through life’s complexities; and for myself, to venture into a dark and musty corner of my soul and give it an airing.
Through the letters we learn about Jill’s clashes with teachers and house mistresses, inspiration from learning and music, and her striving to come to terms with contradictoriness in a school that was “revolting and terrific at the same time”.
In a new rendering of the Australian classic, The Getting of Wisdom, School Days of a Methodist Lady is a universal story about school, growing up and the tender milestones that see us entering adulthood. It will appeal to adult and young adult readers, highlighting how school education has changed over the last fifty years and those things that remain the same. Its anecdotal descriptions of public and private school education in the 1950s and ‛60s make it a valuable contribution to the cultural and social history of schooling in Australia.
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2014 | 9780980757095 | 272 pages | Paperback | 234 x 154 mm | Memoir
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MLC, Methodist, Jill Sanguinetti, 1950s, 1960s, teenage, family relationships, education, schooling, boarding, religious education, coming of age story
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“A meticulously documented and touching memoir of a sensitive and creative schoolgirl at boarding school in the early 1960s – a place where she was often cold, hungry and sad, but also a place of astonishing discovery, both of herself and the big world beyond her own.”
A deeply personal account of teenage struggles with parental and sibling relationships and with school discipline, study demands, tough living conditions and rigorous religious education. Jill's daily life as a school boarder, her rebellions, emotional highs and lows, and encounters with Dr Wood, MLC's charismatic principal and pastor, are described with honesty, hilarity and sharp critical insight.
“This frank and searching narrative is, in fact, a compelling social document. The author demonstrates a remarkable ability to recall the details of her life in the middle of the 20th century in Australia, and to construct from her joys and sorrows a memoir that is warm, thoughtful and inspirational.”
Jill Sanguinetti grew up in the Victorian country town of Kyabram and went to Methodist Ladies’ College as a boarder from 1958 to 1961. Read more