Books like The Getting of Wisdom
The sting of remembered embarrassment, the fierce hunger to belong, and the comedy and cruelty of girls learning how much of identity is performance run through these three books.
If you liked The Getting of Wisdom, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Getting of Wisdom, and we tell you exactly what.
Nanda Grey arrives at an English convent school eager to submit to its elaborate rules and become the right kind of girl. Antonia White renders institutional life with Richardson’s double vision: the child feels every friendship, rebuke and distinction as momentous, while the adult novelist sees the vanity and coercion surrounding her.
Chosen in 1978 as the first Virago Modern Classic, this short, lucid novel became emblematic of the neglected women’s writing that imprint restored. Its particular marvel is that neither faith nor rebellion is simplified. Like Laura Rambotham, Nanda is intelligent, theatrical, vulnerable and continually discovering that approval has hidden terms. Anyone who loved Richardson’s unsparing account of education as social and emotional ordeal should consider this essential.
Atwood takes the half-understood cruelties of girlhood as seriously as Richardson does. When painter Elaine Risley returns to Toronto for a retrospective, memories of childhood companionship begin pressing into the present. The result is a novel about how girls invent hierarchies, enforce conformity and lodge themselves permanently in one another’s imaginations.
A Booker Prize finalist, Cat’s Eye has inspired unusually intense recognition among readers because it names forms of intimidation that adults often dismiss as trivial. Atwood’s wit is colder than Richardson’s, and her structure more intricate, but both novelists understand shame from the inside: its absurdity, its physical force and its long afterlife. Reading it can feel like finding the mature, haunted counterpart to The Getting of Wisdom.
Sybylla Melvyn’s voice erupts onto the page: vain, funny, self-lacerating, ambitious and determined not to accept the life prescribed for her. The kinship with Laura lies less in their shared Australian background than in their embarrassing vitality. Both girls try on selves, hunger for distinction, misread situations and refuse to become decorous heroines merely to please the reader.
Published in 1901 when Franklin was only twenty-one, the novel became an Australian classic and gave its name to the country’s most prestigious literary prize. Yet it remains startlingly unruly rather than dutifully canonical. Its comic exaggeration, candour about female ambition and resistance to sentimental rewards make Sybylla unforgettable. If Laura’s mixture of pretension, courage and mortification won your heart, missing Sybylla would mean missing one of her most exhilarating literary relations.