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How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”
The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. These pieces will be posted gradually, over the next two weeks, allowing the narrative to take shape not through a single telling, but through fragments. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font to honor the green-ink originals. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.
Use the comments to build the story together: ask questions, float theories, invent what’s missing. What do you. think lies between the lines? The archive is incomplete—but the story lives in the spaces between.
The True Motto of Saint Clare’s School:
What Every Girl Learns
Publicly, it is this:
Ad Astra — to the stars.
Embroidered in silver and gold upon the blazer’s crest, shining bright against the red.
Printed in gilt on the Speech Day programme.
Spoken with pride at the opening of each term.
It is what your father believes.
It is the promise tucked into your trunk beside the lavender sachets,
the phrase that makes your little sister sigh and your younger cousins lean in with envy.
It is the promise every girl carries onto her train from Paddington or Waverley.
all the way to the warm-yellow stone of the school walls—
soft from a distance, but cold and grey-veined when touched.
Beautiful, solid, and old.
But quietly—almost tenderly—another version is taught.
Not at once, and never aloud.
It is stitched inside the breast pocket of your blazer,
pale threads just over your heart.