In du Maurier’s gothic classic a young bride marries a widower and is transported to a Cornish mansion where she attempts to fill the shoes of her glamorous predecessor.
Though Caroline’s snubbing of the Bennett sisters ultimately fails to keep Elizabeth and Darcy apart you have to admire her back-stabbing ambition. “She had no conversation, no style, no taste, no beauty,” she snaps, the 19th Century equivalent of trash-talking. Patronizingly cordial to Elizabeth in person, as soon as the eldest Bennett’s back is turned Caroline sticks the knife in. In Austen’s beloved novel of manners, when Caroline-an elegant, well-educated woman with a fortune of twenty thousand pounds-finds herself in danger of being sidelined by Elizabeth Bennett, she does what any villainess would do, freeze her out.
Snobbish, meddling, and two-faced, Caroline Bingley is the original mean girl. Though we might not want them as our best friend, there’s something undeniably alluring, awe-inspiring even, about that most uncompromising of characters-the mean girl. They are an acknowledgement of that little flash of nastiness that surfaces in us every now and again (the time you laughed when your dad broke his chair in a restaurant, the colleague you left smiling with spinach in their teeth). To that end, the books on this list have claws. Give me a heroine who’s sharp tongued and salty-a Becky Sharp, a Lady Macbeth-compared to whom other, more agreeable protagonists, start to feel like warm porridge. When it comes to my reading tastes, that’s a different matter. To put it another way, if I saw them on the streets of London, I’d duck and run for cover. More than two decades after leaving school, the names of teachers and housemistresses long forgotten, the memory of those “mean girls” remains indelible. On Sundays they strode down the aisle to receive Holy Communion-chins high, arms swinging-as if it was a Paris catwalk. They wore biker or cowboy boots and large, oversized men’s cardigans with sleeves voluminous enough to hide cigarettes and tampons.
My teenage years were spent in the shadow of a handful of girls, a clique who strutted around our campus like demigods, flicking long manes of hair, untouchable, I believed, utterly impervious. An elitist bubble, utterly detached from the real world, governed by a kind of snobbish tribalism. A pupil at an all-girls boarding school in the 90s, I attended the kind of crumbling British institution that appealed to upper-crust types and army brats without much academic ambition.
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