Mrs S by K Patrick

Mrs S is a simmering novel about a love affair between staff at a girls’ boarding school. The narrator has moved from Australia to England to work as the matron at a boarding school, where she finds herself an outsider, not only in accent, but in being obviously queer. She becomes fascinated with Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, who seems so different, and yet they are drawn together, eventually starting a secret affair over the summer, but they have to decide what it means for them.

I keep hearing about this book and it lives up to the hype, written in a beautiful way that defies specificity (for example, no characters have names—Mr and Mrs S being the closest—and all of the students are just Girls) and yet tells a very particular story of butch identity and embodiment. Though the love story is the titular focus and centre of the plot, the book also tells a story of a butch lesbian finding both community, through a fellow staff member, and more of a sense of herself and how she wants her body to be. The rigid structures of the school serve as a backdrop to this more fluid, queer sense of being, and the students’ transgressions against the rules, whether justified or unjustified rules, bring a parallel sense of roles, rules, and defiance.

As a literary love story, readers might focus on the writing and fluid style, but it feels that the depiction of queerness and butchness is particularly crucial and the style cannot be separated from that. Mrs S is a book to languish with, yet with plenty to think about.