Despite the broad title, this book is actually a study of the education of English and French girls in private boarding schools. As the author explains, though these schools have hitherto never been subject to detailed study, their educational importance before the establishment of endowed or state secondary schools for girls in the last decades of the nineteenth century was huge. In England before 1870 such schools offered virtually the only institutionalized secondary education for girls; in France, where private schools had to compete with conventual education, they were a significant, and initially dominant, provider. Moreover, their importance grew steadily in the first half of the nineteenth century, as more and more middle-class parents felt that their daughters should receive a secondary education; by the 1860s 50 per cent of English middle-class school girls passed through their doors; in France a quarter did so (against 38 per cent who attended convents).

Bellaigue examines the schools as businesses and as teaching institutions. It is clear that on both sides of the Channel the institutions had much in common. They had the same moderately affluent clientele (the wealthiest families preferred to keep their girls at home and use governesses), taught a broad curriculum (which excluded classical languages but gave greater weight to science than did the English public schools at this date), and were run by enterprising business women (who were not necessarily themselves of middle-class origin). It is equally clear, however, that the differences between the schools in the two countries were greater than the similarities. The French schools were closely regulated: from the Napoleonic era, those who taught in the establishments had to have been certificated by the local department, and, as the century wore on, the schools were visited by inspectors. The English schools, on the other hand, were subject only to the laws of the market place. If there were initiatives to set up training colleges for governesses and school mistresses, they received no state support before the end of the period under review. The French schools were also much more austere. They imitated their conventual competitors in being large, formal, and routinized. They further closely followed the pedagogical methods of the lycées and ancien régime colleges in placing great emphasis on discipline and emulation. English schools, in contrast, were much smaller and more intimate, attempting to recreate the atmosphere of the domestic hearth. In the early century pupils were still taught individually. Emphasis was placed on an enquiring mind, even if throughout the period competition between the girls was frowned upon. Bellaigue puts the differences primarily down to the countries' distinctive religious cultures. Protestant girls were educated in order to flower intellectually and given freedom at school in order to learn self-control. Catholic girls were shut away in boarding schools in order to avoid the temptations of the outside world during puberty. The French emphasis was placed on surveillance because Catholics had a much more sexualized concept of female adolescence.

Bellaigue's study fills an important gap in our understanding of the development of girls' education in the nineteenth century. Her book is clearly written, well-paced, and provided with useful tables and illustrations. Her comparative approach also proves a valuable way of capturing the essence of boarding-school education in the two countries. Admittedly, the approach is not novel – her work is antedated by the broader 1971 study of developments in English and French education in the first half of the nineteenth century by Vaughan and Archer (which she strangely does not acknowledge). But there can be no doubt that as a comparative study it is exemplary. Although she uses the terms Protestant and Catholic rather too cavalierly for this reviewer – there was no uniform Protestant or even Catholic view about the moral value of secluding the young – the way in which she relates a particular educational development to idiosyncratic historical, legal, and socio-cultural traditions is impressive. The book, however, is not simply a contribution to the history of education. As the introduction makes clear, the work is ultimately intended to throw light on the ongoing debate about gender relations in England and France. In 1995 the French historian, Mona Ozouf, published a study of French female writers entitled, Les mots des femmes, in which she argued that French women in the modern era have always been much better assimilated into male society than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. The result was that French feminism has been far less aggressive. Bellaigue agrees with this judgement for the nineteenth century (p. 3), and sets out in her book to explore in what ways the distinction can be illuminated through a study of female education. In her conclusion, she claims that it can. While accepting that both the French and English boarding schools were preparing middle-class girls for domesticity, she argues that the former were much more closely integrated into a masculine world. French schools were frequently headed by married women for whom teaching was a career; like men, all teachers had to have a professional qualification; the girls often had male teachers and were subjected to the same regime as their brothers. English middle-class girls may have had a softer and more interesting education but they were separated from the male world. This is an interesting and plausible conclusion, provided of course that married women in England were really as closely confined as Ozouf would have us believe. Bellaigue's evidence conversely may point in a different direction, which she never explores. The fact that middle-class English girls were taught to think for themselves, while their French sisters were intellectually sat upon, may better help to explain the development of a strident and questioning feminism on this side of the Channel rather than the putative claim that in later life they were more completely relegated to the Doll's House.