The Finishing School

by Gail Godwin

Justin Stokes would never forget the summer she turned fourteen, nor the woman who transformed her bleak adolescent life into a wondrous place of brilliant color. In the little pondside hut also known as the “finishing school,” eccentric, free-spirited Ursula DeVane opened up a world full of magical possibilities for Justin, teaching her valuable lessons of love and loyalty, and encouraging her to change, to learn, to grow. But the lessons of the finishing school have their dark side as well, as Justin learns how deep friendship can be shattered by shocking, unforgivable betrayal.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Chick Lit, Literary Fiction, Young Adult, Coming Of Age, Southern

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Gail Kathleen Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer. She has published one non-fiction work, two collections of short stories, and eleven novels, three of which have been nominated for the National Book Award and five of which have made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Godwin's body of work has garnered many honors, including three National Book Award nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Five of her novels have been on the New York Times best seller list.
Godwin lives and writes in Woodstock, New York.

Reviews

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even the most precocious adolescent is still essentially a child. It's a gross unfairness and poor judgment on the part of any adult to forget this. This story, in a nutshell, is about the consequences of burdening a youngster with adult confidences, and very nearly expecting grown-up friendship from a fourteen-year-old girl.

If you like to plumb the depths of the psyches of adolescent females, take a gander at Gail Godwin. It takes some patience to read her work, but when she's good, she's good. Avoid her more recent novels and stick with her older stuff. Father Melancholy's Daughter is especially good if you have the patience. The Finishing School is a close second.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite of Godwin's, but a very good novel all the same. She does write the same story over and over again, but it's a story I enjoy reading, and one that leaves me turning it over in my mind. Her stories are so introspective that somehow it blasts me out of my tendency to navel-gaze. And the New England summer setting is pretty dreamy. The Finishing School also had some interesting meditations on acting, and is a story of the false self vs. the true self. Godwin captures the intensity of early female adolescence, in all its shades.

[Deb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Godwin's 1984 novel is about a 14-year-old girl who is infatuated with her 40-something neighbor, the sophisticated Ursula DeVane. Justine Stokes is bored and lonely, having moved to rural New York State with her recently widowed mother. She is instantly smitten with the eccentric Ursula, who encourages the attachment. We know from the beginning of the novel that things do not end well.

I loved this book for the same reason I loved Unfinished Desires (2010). Godwin writes about intelligent women, seeking self-knowledge and wisdom in relation with each other. Even self-consciously feminist novels - and this is not - too often depict women in relation to men or to their children, despite the fact our relationships with other women are a key part - maybe the most important part? of our inner lives. Godwin respects the complexities of women's relationships and does not romanticize them. I also admire how Godwin doesn't do our thinking for us and does not cast judgment on the characters she has created.

[Marne Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that The Chatham School Affair wanted to be. We know from the beginning that a tragedy occurred in the life of the narrator when she was 14, and while we are reminded of it throughout the book, the foreshadowing feels natural to the story and not tacked on. When we finally do get to the end, we realize that it was only a tragedy in the mind of a very young teenager, and things were not quite as we had been led to believe. There is much here about the projections we put up for others and the projections we cast onto others, and how both kinds of illusions can be dangerous. I really enjoyed this one, probably the best Godwin I’ve read so far. (Plus, the fact that my beloved Mohonk Mountain House plays a peripheral role in the story didn’t hurt, either.)

[Phoebe Kate Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modern Greek tragedy. The plot is rather contrived, but it's the vivid characterizations that make this novel mesmerizing to the end. Gail Godwin possesses a unique talent to breathe so much life into her characters that it's a delight to be in their company, no matter what they do or how strained the story line may become.

[Lisa Hope · Rating 3 out of 5]

My history with this book has been, well, oh, maybe tenuous. I bought the book shortly after it came out and had been remaindered. The coming of age aspect was appealing, as were the references to Jane Austen and Ford Maddox Ford in the "blurbs." And then, the author had grown up in the Asheville area, a place to which I had just moved. But it sat on my shelf. I may have cracked it open and given it a start once, but maybe not. Eventually, in one of my book pre-BX purges I gave it away. Then a little over a year ago I saw the copy at our church's used book store; the money goes to support various women's charities. I regreted never giving the book a chance the first time around so I bought it.

And now I have read it. All I can say is it is okay. It certainly did not "wow" me. I would recommend to to some friends, ones who will like this particular sort of book, the coming of age/mentor book. It lacks the irony or the wit of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and is a bit of a limp thing with an overwrought suspense element. The big betrayal turns out to be pretty bland. The most sympathetic characters are not as well developed as they might be.

I liked the book, but I did not love it. Would recommend it, but without that urgency with which I have recommended other books. In short, a good, entertaining and intelligently wrought book that just didn't set a fire to my imagination. I can see how others would love it though. Godwin is a fine writer; I think this story just wasn't the story for me. Too many shades of all ready done to death stories from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Hellman's The Children's Hour. I look forward to reading her other books.


In short, just another book, well written, but only moderately engaging. The main feeling was I had been down that street already and had a better time before.

[Kurt Keefner · Rating 3 out of 5]

What this novel is, is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie scaled down to two people. Ursula is Miss Brodie and Justin is all of Miss Brodie's female students. Ursula puts on an inauthentic sophistication, just like Miss Brodie, and tries to live through Justin, just as Miss Brodie tried to live through her girls. Justin is impressionable and hero-worships her mentor. There are sexual hijinks afoot (but not lesbianism, in either story). Eventually Justin betrays Ursula, just as one of Miss Brodie's girls betrays her.

The foreshadowing of the betrayal in Godwin's novel is repetitive and tedious. The actual act of betrayal is anticlimactic.

The novel is derivative, although mildly entertaining. The one interesting variation on the theme is that Justin actually learns how to be an actress from her encounter with Ursula, so something good does come of the experience. However, Justin does not get the punishment she deserves for betraying her friend and mentor.

If you're interested in a novel about young people and betrayal, I'd recommend A Separate Peace. If you want something about a dangerous intellectual clique, I'd recommend The Secret History by Donna Tartt. And I would watch the wonderful film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

[Cathryn Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of one idyllic summer in the 1950s when 14-year-old Justin Stokes wrenchingly moves from her old family home in Fredericksburg, Virginia (after the successive deaths of her beloved grandparents and father) to Clove, New York to a modern, cookie-cutter house in a development populated primarily by IBMers. While riding her bike one day, she meets an eccentric, 40-something woman named Ursula DeVane, and a wonderful, albeit complex, friendship develops, until tragedy rips them apart in a way that is cruel and emotionally complex. Gail Godwin has always been one of my favorite authors, and as all her books do, this one will capture your attention on page one and your heart by the time you have finished. It is a story of friendship and love, family history and scandalous secrets and how everything can be destroyed when those secrets are harshly revealed. Highly recommended.

[Donna McCaul Thibodeau · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this about twenty years ago and have zero recollection of it, which should have been a clue. Nevertheless, I plowed into it again. It took me almost a week to get through, which was another clue - I never take more than four days to read a book unless I am extremely busy. My main problem with this was that it had a huge buildup to an event that I guessed and also that the main character was not someone that I liked. This one goes on the donate pile.

[Seawitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful character study and suspenseful story of a young and an older woman who bond over one brief and tragic summer.

[Marguerite · Rating 3 out of 5]

I borrowed this book through the online library, Overdrive.

I've never read a book by this author, so this was fresh to me. It was a novel about a woman who is recalling a time in her life when she was 14. The story would spend brief amounts of time with the woman in the present but most of the book was about her fourteen year old self as she navigated through some serious life changes. The author engaged in considerable foreshadowing, so you knew throughout the book that there was unpleasantness on the way.

This book caused me to spend time thinking about my own teenage self and the arrogance and insecurity that comes with that time in life. I could mostly identify with the main character. I could clearly visualize the characters and the scenes from the author's descriptions. I could empathize with the fourteen year old and her helplessness against fate and grownups.

This is likely to be a book I'll remember for a while (I read a lot and some books just don't leave a strong impression) and I'll think about my own memories growing up and contrast them with where I am today.

I recommend this book. The characters were interesting and the plot moved along well.

[Dale Boyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book when I first came to Chicago in 1985 and remember liking it very much. I found a copy in a used bookstore recently and decided to read it again. I'm pleased to say I found it even better this time around. What an insightful book this is, especially about that age when we're trying to figure out who we really are, and constructing idyllic versions of people, only to become disillusioned with them later on when confronted with the harsh realities of daily life. What a pleasure it is to read a book that's told so well, and in such an old fashioned story-telling tradition! I absolutely love this book, and hope a whole new crew of people discover its charms as well.

[Laura Hogensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An eccentric, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing older woman and an isolated malleable adolescent girl. TFS will appeal to fans of Anne Rivers Siddons. It's told retrospectively. There's a central tragedy that the narrator circles around and hints at, but that the reader doesn't discover until the end. Godwin plots this novel elegantly. It's a great addition to the "coming of age" genre, and will be hard to put down. Unlike ARS novels, however, the central reveal/tragedy is far more realistic. No high drama here.

[Angela · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, and I had several experiences of, "I can't believe an author finally captured that!" while reading it. But it left me profoundly sad for the losses the two main characters suffered--not the deaths, the big losses, but everything they lost between them.

[Chloe (Always Booked) · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing style of this book was NOT for me and the fat, gay and mental health shaming was TERRIBLE. This book is about a young girl who moves with her mom and sibling to her aunt's house after her dad dies. Justin is 14 but a 40 something brother/sister duo befriend her and this book really explores her relationship with the female. This moral of this book is that your idols aren't always as great as they seem and we're all human. However, this had a really meandering way of getting there and it was a short book that felt super long. The older woman (Ursula) had betrayed her mother and later in the story Justin does the same to her so that juxtaposition and exploration of human nature was interesting enough, but this just wasn't executed well for me. The book is told mostly in the "Then" time but we do get dual timelines. The book will also jump point of views with no indication for just a brief time and it was really off putting. Overall, not for me.

SPOILERS AHEAD:
Ursula had walked in on her mom having an affair and exploited her. Later, Justin found Ursula in the midst of an affair and that burst her bubble of perfection and sort of ended the relationship. The writing style of this book was NOT for me and the fat, gay and mental health shaming was TERRIBLE. This book is about a young girl who moves with her mom and sibling to her aunt's house after her dad dies. Justin is 14 but a 40 something brother/sister duo befriend her and this book really explores her relationship with the female. This moral of this book is that your idols aren't always as great as they seem and we're all human. However, this had a really meandering way of getting there and it was a short book that felt super long. The older woman (Ursula) had betrayed her mother and later in the story Justin does the same to her so that juxtaposition and exploration of human nature was interesting enough, but this just wasn't executed well for me. The book is told mostly in the "Then" time but we do get dual timelines. The book will also jump point of views with no indication for just a brief time and it was really off putting. Overall, not for me.

SPOILERS AHEAD:
Ursula had walked in on her mom having an affair and exploited her. Later, Justin found Ursula in the midst of an affair and that burst her bubble of perfection and sort of ended the relationship.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A haunting tale of a woman remembering a year of life in which she was overcome with admiration for a mysterious neighbor whose influence continues to intrigue her.

"That's why I envy Justin here in no small way. Despite her unfortunate room, and all those milkmaids threatening to swallow her with their smiles ... she can start her life over and be anything she chooses to be. Nobody knows what she was like back in Fredericksburg. She has lost all the props that defined her. Nobody knows all the peculiarities and character traits of her forebears so they can pretend to recognize those traits in her. She's a clean slate. When she meets new people, or new challenges, she is free to respond to the unique demands of the moment. Whereas I often feel I have been playing the same part in a show that's been running too long."

"The person in the song is really addressing a powerful and constant state of yearning more than he is any real lover. It's the state of this yearning that torments him, yet he also loves his torment. He needs it. Because he understands that being able to feel this yearning so exquisitely is his secret strength."

"But what we ought to fear is the kind of death that happens in life. It can happen at any time. You're going along, and then, at some point, you congeal. You know, like jelly. You're not fluid anymore. You solidify at a certain point and from then on your life is doomed to be a repetition of what you have done before."

"All beautiful, dangerous idols fall, I thought, if you keep your eye on them long enough."

"Maybe it's because I'm more confident of my own powers now, not so afraid of losing myself, of being molded by other people's needs of me, of being overwhelmed by them, that I can live in those strange, green days again and willingly be that girl."

"As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished."

[McLaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this novel about Justin's 'coming of age' heart-wrenching and authentic. It stirred up my own long forgotten teenage idealisation of older women. This idealisation is probably a necessary and painful part of psychological and spiritual development.

In the novel Justin is thirteen and her immediate experience is of losing her grandparents and father in quick succession and being uprooted from the grandparent's family home in the South to stay (with her mother and much younger brother) with her aunt and cousin in a different part of the country. Justin is looking for reminders of her lost life. She first hears music, Bach, which her grandfather loved and then meets Ursula who lives in a very old family house with her brother who is a piano teacher and is, at least in Ursula's eyes, a brilliant musician.

The dramatic and unrealistic older Ursula living in a fantasy world is the depositary of Justin's idealistic dreams allowing Justin to disgard more prosaic views of herself and her present surroundings in a new housing development. In the end Justin falls out of love with Ursula, calling Ursula a liar and rejecting her. Ursula's life and loves are too overwhelming, complicated and sad for an uprooted girl of thirteen to take in.

[Tomson Jane Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Radclyffe Hall's famous protagonist in Well of Loneliness, Gail Godwin's sports a masculine given name. Justin seeks a life full of meaning and discovers a mentor in a much older person: Ursula. There are echos of May Sarton's 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, but in the case of Godwin's story, Justin is the central character, not the older, wiser, Ursula. Additionally, I've always felt jealousy to be one of the least redeeming qualities in any human being. It leads to so much suffering. Therefore, I was not surprised to see it explored alongside various forms of love people may feel for one another in this detailed and thoughtful book. This story is not the first, and certainly won't be the last, to explore the blurred line between sexual longing, desire for guidance, and the flattery of singular attention from a youthful admirer. But it is a deliciously well-written coming of age story and one I highly recommend.

[Merri · Rating 4 out of 5]

SPOILER ALERT...please don't read this comment if you haven't finished the book! I need some help understanding the ending of this novel. The whole time I was reading it, it was with bated breath waiting for the massive, unforgivable secret, along with betrayal. Come to find out....she's having an affair with the married guy that Julian hates for taking most of their property. Meh. I can understand why this would irritate Julian, and certainly Abel's pregnant wife would also take offense, but why does Justin feel so hurt and betrayed by this? I read this book when I was 14 (Justin's age), and now again now that I'm Ursula's age. Now that I'm older, I realize how terrible inappropriate their relationship was. But after all these years, I still don't understand the build up behind this ending! And where was Justin's betrayal? I must have missed that part, too!

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gail Godwin is one of my new favorite writers. She is able to get into the psychology of a character (in this case the main character Justin) that it makes me relate to them even though the setting is unrelatable. I dog eared several nuggets of life wisdom though this was a library book! I am delighted there is so much more of her work to enjoy. She will likely always be a 5 star read for me. My 2nd read by Godwin.

[Marybeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in a summer in the 1950s, this book may not speak to many young women today, but to those readers of a certain age, Justin's emotional transition from an adolescent to teenager will resonate as true-to-life. Some superfluous plot lines make the story less than successful, but the tragic ending packs a punch, and Godwin leads you up to it and throws you into it with finesse.

[Peggy D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book until the big reveal of the "shocking" tragedy and subsequent betrayal. They were neither shocking nor a tragedy nor a betrayal, though they were alluded to MANY times in the previous pages of the book. I do love how Godwin portrayed adolescents, particularly Justin, though Godwin's portrait of the bitchy cousin and the obese friend were rather one dimensional.

[Deb Staley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love Gail Godwin’s writing. It’s so real, about real things, real feelings, written is such an honest, forthright and true style. The characters are as real people are, nothing contrived or forced. I look forward to my next GG read.

[Andi · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't completely finish this book, but enough that I felt the need to rate it. I found it all to be overly indulgent and frankly tedious. Besides the very concerning friendship between an eccentric woman and a 14-year-old girl.

[Donna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this one was dragging in the middle and I did some speed reading to get through.
Not as enjoyable as the other two that I read by this author.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read, although a bit predictable.

[Jackie Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a terrible book, in the end it wrapped it all up nicely, but it was slow to get there so i struggled a bit.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging and quick read with a fair amount of foreshadowing.

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well structured. The shifts back and forth in time are smoothly done. I just never got invested enough to give it 5 stars.

[Jill Frederickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to rate it 2.5. It is very much of its time (1985). I did love the line, “As long as you can go on creating new roles for yourself, you are not vanquished.”