The Eliot Girls Read Online Free Page A

next to her grave likeness and encapsulated what Larissa McAllister felt to be the theme of her own life. After George Eliot, the women formed a pictorial assembly line, their words, their sketched faces, offering nothing so common as inspiration; their ideas were to be the students’ sustenance, their very breath: Mary Wollstonecraft (“Nothing contributes so much to tranquillizing the mind as a steady purpose—a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.”); Simone de Beauvoir (“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.”); Virginia Woolf (“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”); Eleanor Roosevelt (“Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one.”); Betty Friedan (“The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive.”). At the end of the gallery was a portrait of Larissa McAllister herself—an audacious placement meant to convey that she was assuming her rightful place in history—wearing a smile of Mona Lisa reserve, surveying, with modest approval, the scene of her creation.
    Audrey edged through the crowd to the grand central staircase and made her way up past the mahogany panels with the names of all the head girls and prefects etched in gold. At the landing window, she paused: her gaze fell on the swing set in the Junior School playground. Although not the site of her earliest memory—that involved something less pleasing, a running crash into a giant pillar in a neighbour’s basement, a splitting pain in her forehead, a babysitter’s rank breath, her orange teddy bear, tucked against her chest—its significance, bound as it was in her ever-growing Eliot mythology, came in time to surpass the status of that first recollection. She was on the swing, propelling herself ever higher. Ruth, ordinarily overprotective, was off attending to school business, and Audrey was alone, perhaps for the first time ever, in this place perceived as entirely safe, sheltered from the threats—the thieves, the perverts, the dangerous drivers—of the city. Even now, on the bustling landing, Audrey could remember that feeling of being alone—astoundingly, marvellously—out in the world. She could see herself on that swing, looking down at her childish legs, athletic and determined. It seemed that at that moment she became aware of herself. She moved her legs because she chose to, because her brain sent a signal. She was not just living—running over the moist grasses, noticing a purple bruise on her shin, leaning back and looking up at the clouds—but conscious of living.
    Ruth had taken her inside after that. As they made their way down the corridor, its empty glass cases awaiting awards that had yet to be created, everything so clean that they seemed to have been the first people to set foot inside, Ruth glanced furtively around, then pulled Audrey into a shady classroom. “Next year, this will be your room,” she said. The curtains were drawn across a wall of windows. In the corner, a child-sized Paddington Bear stood guard over bookshelves crammed with a kaleidoscopic array of illustrated volumes. Framed watercolours were hung in a row across the top of the blackboard—children skipping down a cobbled road, a young boy curled up in a window seat with a book, a girl napping with her head on the stomach of a watchful St. Bernard.
    Audrey was wearing the new dress bought for her upcoming entrance interview. When she’d woken up in the morning, it was hung up on her closet door like an empty person, new patent leather Mary Jane shoes with a pretty rose buckle positioned underneath. She walked up and down the aisles, stepping lightly, as though afraid to awaken the spirits that would banish them for trespassing. Finally, she stopped at the