What Is the Inez Project? – Imagining an Archive

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Earlier in the project, Paul asked what Inez of the Upper IV “is.” What is its spine?

It is, all at once, a boarding school story, a Cold War tale, a feminist experiment, an alternate history, a digital humanities book project, a satire, a family saga, and maybe a spy novel in disguise. A weird mash-up, the stories are all of these and none of them. Also, in some cases, spanking stories, though there seems far too little of that content. The truer answer is that it is an imagined archive, a deliberately constructed collection of documents about fictional women whose lives, had they existed, would rarely have appeared in the memoirs or state papers of their time.

As I wrote my response to Paul, explaining what the project had become and what I thought held it together, something unexpected happened. The letter that follows, from Anastasia de Vries-Kavanagh, a former Head Girl arguing against the digitisation of the Blue Prefect Study’s archive, came out of my fingers and onto the keyboard as though it had always existed. I hadn’t planned to write it. I hadn’t even known Anastasia had something to say about the matter until she began saying it.

The project began with a book, the marvellous Terms and Conditions by Ysenda M. Graham, a collection of interviews with “old girls” from the “pre-duvet” era. That was followed by a bit of school detention play at TASSP in June 2025. Taken together with my own girls’ school background, these left me with a question:

Where, in the historical record, do the lives of intelligent, socially literate women survive, whatever their class, particularly before 1960?

Having spent the past thirty years (yes, Virginia, I am that old) doing archival work in women’s social histories, I knew where we were unlikely to find them. Not in the public speeches of male leaders. Rarely in intelligence files, written largely by and for men, or in official correspondence. Not often in published memoirs, which can erase trouble as easily as triumph.

So where should we look? In the world I’m imagining, Saint Clare, traces survive in:

• School reports
• Punishment books
• Household ledgers
• Student and alumnae letters
• Journals and diaries
• Marginalia
• Staff memoranda
• Errant drafts and fragments never intended for any archive

These are the places where we can begin to reconstruct how women learned, negotiated, exercised, and sometimes resisted power.

The project treats my imagined 1955 girls’ boarding school, Saint Clare School for Girls in Wales, as the smallest unit of a late-stage imperial nation-state: a social hierarchy, a training ground, a crucible for discipline and performance. The micro-politics of Saint Clare mirror the macro-politics of mid-century Britain, where the “Old Boys” still imagined themselves firmly in charge even as events exposed the limits of their knowledge and authority. Meanwhile, the “Old Girls,” their wives, daughters, sisters, and colleagues, exercised forms of influence that rarely appeared in official accounts, sometimes sustaining the established order, sometimes challenging it, and occasionally doing both at once.

At the centre of the project is a fictional matrilineal braid, an exploration of how knowledge, caution, courage, and strategy pass from grandmother to mother to daughter, often through observation, discipline, and silence. The women in this world, Inez, Gwen, Margaret, Lillian, Anne, Clarissa, and Gladys, exercise power within and around the institutions that shape their lives. They protect one another, misunderstand one another, make mistakes, preserve traditions, and sometimes discover that the traditions they have inherited deserve challenging.

The men, meanwhile, do what history records: some with honour, some with insight, some with catastrophic blindness, and a few with corrosive corruption. Their authority is real. So are the limits of what they know.

The imagined documents come from many places, but the project’s symbolic centre is the Blue Prefect Study, a room within Saint Clare School for Girls, protected by layers of walls, physical and otherwise. It is simultaneously central and unseen, intimate and institutional, powerful and quiet.

Most importantly, the Study remains a working room, and its archive belongs to the current Head Girl and prefects. Only they possess the keys and the right of access, a privilege they surrender when they leave office. Each generation inherits the records and the responsibility for them, adds its own contributions, and passes them to the next. Even the Old Girls who deposited documents there have no automatic right to return and consult them.

The collection remains decidedly undigitised, unindexed, and largely uncatalogued except through the working knowledge of its custodians. Its authority rests partly in its exclusion of men,[1] but equally in its refusal to become part of the searchable, extractable, easily misinterpreted, or cancelled public record.

Its preservation is not simply a matter of keeping old papers. It is a continuing practice through which girls exercise authority over their own history, and learn that keeping another person’s confidence carries responsibilities that do not end when the original circumstances have passed.

If Inez is about anything, therefore, it is about who keeps this history, who decides what deserves remembering, and why the abundant traces women left behind so rarely found their way into the histories written about them.

[1] My great-great-grandmother also attended Saint Clare, but the enumeration of generations was becoming excessive.

[2] Punishment books remain in the Headmaster’s locked cabinet until at least seventy-five years have elapsed since the final entry.