The Archives
If you have come this far, you have already fallen a little in love with the school, and so now is the safest time to tell you the truth: it is a story. That turns out to be the best part, not the worst.
Where it came from
St Elowen’s is not real, and everything in it is. The house stands where a real sort of house stands, in the real Weald of Kent, in the real low gold light that comes after Wealden rain. There was a real school, once, that taught the author what a school could feel like from the inside, though it is not named here, and should not be.
The Yew Walk was planted by a gardener who came from Versailles, and that is nearly true, in the way the best details are. The lantern in the tower began as a real light in a real Cornish story, kept burning for the boats. And somewhere behind all of it there is a daughter, and a wish that she should have a school like this to grow up inside, even if it could only ever be made of paper.
How it was made
The books are written slowly, and read aloud a great deal, and changed whenever a sentence does not sound like something a real girl would think. The rule of the whole thing is that there is no magic in it: no spells, no wizards, nothing that could not have happened. The wonder is meant to be the ordinary kind, which is the deepest kind: the wonder of a great old house at the end of a long drive, and a light in a window that nobody will explain, and the discovery that you belong somewhere.
And the honest note
No child should be genuinely deceived, and so we say it plainly, here and in the foot of every page: St Elowen’s is a school in a story. You cannot enrol. You cannot visit. But you can read your way in, and once you have, it is a good deal harder to say that it is not real than you might think.