The New Girls is a resonant, engrossing novel about five girls during their formative prep-school years in the tumultuous mid-sixties. Into their reality of first-class trips to Europe, resort vacations, and deb parties enter the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and the sexual revolution. As the old traditions collide with the new society, the girls lose their innocence, develop a social conscience, and discover their sexuality -- blossoming into women shaped by their turbulent times. “Satirical and highly entertaining...a delicate moment of social history, the mid-sixties, when the old rules were being unlaced by the new girls.” - Atlantic Monthly “It’s funny without sacrificing intelligence, intelligent without being pretentious. It’s all-around good reading.” - Boston Globe “Gutcheon, a graduate of Miss Porter’s and Radcliffe, clearly knows the way things were at such insulated boarding schools ― the teachers in charge, the kinds of girls, the way they acted, talked and dreamed, the bonds they forged, the shocks they survived as girls becoming women.” - Publishers Weekly “Gutcheon has an impeccable fix on time, place, and native customs ― and…pathos of a vanished youth.” - Kirkus Reviews “This is the story of those crucial relationships and of a harrowing loss of innocence.” - Library Journal “There is a Fitgeraldian quality in Gutcheon’s portrayal of the space and beauty and order that money can buy… What we do come to understand ― or rather, to feel ― is what it was like to be among the young girls at this bastion of tradition and propriety in the early ’60s.” - New York Newsday “The author moves in and knows the world about which she writes. Good entertaining reading.” - Pensacola News The New Girls is a resonant, engrossing novel about five girls during their formative prep-school years in the tumultuous mid-sixties. Into their reality of first-class trips to Europe, resort vacations, and deb parties enter the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and the sexual revolution. As the old traditions collide with the new society, the girls lose their innocence, develop a social conscience, and discover their sexuality -- blossoming into women shaped by their turbulent times. Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of the novels, The New Girls , Still Missing , Domestic Pleasures , Saying Grace , Five Fortunes , More Than You Know , Leeway Cottage , and Good-bye and Amen . She is the writer of several film scripts, including the Academy-Award nominee The Children of Theatre Street . She lives in New York City. The New Girls By Gutcheon, Beth Perennial Copyright © 2004 Beth R. Gutcheon All right reserved. ISBN: 0060977027 Chapter One New Girls When Muffin's grandmother arrived at Miss Pratt's in 1903, she took the train up from New York, along with two other girls, three trunks, seven hatboxes, twelve suitcases, and a chaperon sent by the school to escort them from Grand Central. They were met at the station by the school stagecoach, and at the gate of Pratt Hall by the maid who was to help them unpack their things and redo their hair before dinner. When Muffin's mother arrived in September of '32, she took the train from Boston to Hartford in the company of her three best friends and her brother, who was on his way to Yale. Her friend Grace smoked a cigarette after lunch in the dining car. When Muffin arrived in the fall of 1960, the first thing she did was to search out the bedroom on the third floor of Pratt Hall where her grandmother had scratched her initials in the window glass with her diamond ring. Muffin wished she could put her initials in the glass there beside them, but she didn't have a diamond. Muffin had two secret sorrows in life. The first was her nickname; she would have preferred to be called Margaret or Meg. "Muffin" made her sound small and furry, or like something to eat. At Miss Pratt's she soon discovered that everyone named Margaret was called Muffy, and all Sandras were Sandy, Louises were Wheezy (except for one Lou), and there was one girl each called Cibby, Gub-gub, and Peaches. Her other sorrow was that she thought she was fat. She wasn't, particularly. Her mother, after six children, still wore the same size eight she had at boarding school, and clearly thought an ounce of extra fat a character flaw. While Muffin had gained four or five pounds when she reached puberty, the truth was, most of the extra weight was in her bust. Muffin took to wearing Bermuda-length cut-off jeans and her father's old shirts with the tails hanging out, and when she looked in the mirror she saw a strange glob of a torso supported on slim strong legs. She mourned the bony body she had lived in for three-quarters of her life, and instinctively fell into the habit of keeping the new one under wraps. Muffin wanted anxiously to be popular -- mwent on wanting it and working for it, despite all the evidence that she already was. Up until she was thir