A Garden of Girls; Or, Famous Schoolgirls of Former Days — Inside the Classic

Voice and Rhetorical Register

Concannon’s prose moves between two distinct registers. In expository passages, she writes with the measured authority of a historian: she cites Fénélon, M. Octave Gréard, and Père La Chaise, and uses phrases like "as he has painted her" to invoke a gallery of educational ideals. But when describing individual girls, the tone becomes more intimate and brisk. For Marie-Jeanne d’Aumale, she notes the girl was "a busy young person, whose usefulness in minding turkeys, and similar offices, was never questioned." This shift from abstract principle to concrete domestic detail is a deliberate structural choice. The rhetorical register also includes exclamatory moments—"Vive Saint-Cyr!"—that break the scholarly surface and reveal the author’s personal investment in the subject.

Pace and Structural Rhythm

The excerpts show a pattern of alternating long, discursive paragraphs with shorter, scene-driven ones. The introduction moves slowly, building a case for the book’s relevance through analogy (the Sistine Madonna, the "Valiant Woman") and quotation. In contrast, the sketch of Marie-Jeanne accelerates: a single sentence carries her from home life to the dormitory, where the morning ritual of holy water and "Benedicamus Domino" is rendered in a few swift clauses. This rhythm—expansive reflection followed by compressed narrative—is consistent with the book’s design as a collection of sketches. Each sketch appears to open with contextual background, then narrows to a specific moment or routine, creating a wave-like pace that mirrors the transition from general to particular.

Recurring Details and Thematic Anchors

Two recurring details anchor the excerpts: the image of the "Valiant Woman" and the metaphor of leaven. The introduction presents the biblical figure as a test for educational systems: "Do those who have charge of the Education of the Irish Girls of To-day stand often before that picture?" Later, in the Saint-Cyr section, the leaven metaphor reappears: the school was to be "the leaven, which, hidden in ‘three measures of meal’ … was ‘to leaven the whole.’" This repetition ties the introduction’s framework to a specific case study. Another persistent detail is the emphasis on practical skills—needlework, farm management, teaching poor children—which Concannon uses to define the educated woman. These details are not merely decorative; they function as thematic anchors that unify the disparate sketches under a single educational philosophy.

Readers will find that Concannon’s book rewards attention to its framing devices: the preface and the Saint-Cyr section together establish a lens through which the other sketches are meant to be viewed. The author’s voice is neither neutral nor purely academic; it carries a clear conviction about the role of education in national renewal. For those interested in the history of girls’ schooling or in early twentieth-century Catholic educational thought, this work offers a primary source that is as much about its own era as about the past it describes.

Reading Concannon’s account of Margaret More’s disciplined studies, I found myself thinking of the quiet games my own grandmother kept in a worn drawer. There was something touching about that old-fashioned faith in training the senses. It reminded me, somehow, of the gentle patience in Miller's Mind training for children Book 2 (of 3) A practical training for successful living; Educational games that train the senses — Edition Insights, a different era’s whisper about the same hopeful, unhurried work of shaping a mind.