Malory Towers

Rowling has spoken about growing up on British boarding school stories, and Hogwarts runs on Blyton's machinery before it runs on magic:

• Four houses, a points system, and a cup awarded at the end of the year
• A train that takes the children away from their parents in the first chapter
• Dormitory friendships formed in week one and kept for seven books
• A competitive sport nobody outside the school has heard of

The graph already holds Narnia and The Worst Witch pointing here. This is the third leg, and the one that supplies the institution rather than the wardrobe or the witch.

Hughes invented the form and Blyton is writing inside it ninety years later, with the furniture intact: a new pupil arriving alone, houses that compete, a bully who is eventually understood, sport as the moral arena, and a headmistress whose approval is the plot's currency. What Blyton changes is who it is for. Tom Brown is a boys' book about becoming a Victorian gentleman; Malory Towers is a girls' book about becoming somebody, and the school is a place you are sent to rather than sentenced to.