Tales of star pupils, outsiders, bullies and the bullied. From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, to Piggy in Lord of the Flies, these stories capture the foibles and perils of childhood

At the beginning of September, they are scrubbed and expectant. “I have enough gunpowder in this jar to blow up this school,” says Muriel Spark’s Miss Lockhart. It’s her party piece for the first science lesson. All is new.

Like a spool in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, school goes on interminably. Press rewind or fast forward and it’s still playing. Childhood, adolescence. Add in teaching and parenting for me. I no longer attend classes or assemblies. I rarely walk along a school corridor. But what is concealed intrigues me. Every schoolchild, real or fictional, is an insider with off-the-record information. Don’t trust guidelines on transparency. Parents are the last to know, as Lorna Parry in my new novel, Another Mother’s Son, discovers.

Six of the children in my top 10 go on to become adult; the others are kept behind in class for ever.

1. James Steerforth in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens



I have always fancied Steerforth, who is in control and outward looking. The character is in the name, but not wholly: ennui hangs about this charmer. The boys of Salem House worship him and cane-happy Mr Creakle dares not lay a hand on him. He has insomnia. His mind is not as quiet as it might be for a star pupil. This adds to the interest. One wet Saturday, the boys go berserk: hapless Mr Mells is demolished by Steerforth – and dismissed. The episode leaves a vile taste. DC joins in three cheers as Mr Creakle warmly shakes Steerforth’s hand. If Dickens reappeared in the 21st century, he would have an instant understanding of approval ratings.

2. Nanda Grey in Frost in May by Antonia White



To the usual claustrophobia of school, add the Roman Catholic church. Nanda is in the Convent of the Five Wounds. She is new to the faith, and her unshakable outsider status makes her hyperattentive to the bells, smells and mind-boggling tales told by the nuns. Her friends, cradle Catholics of grand European families, reveal exotic home lives. Nanda feels dull in comparison. The novel she writes in the infirmary during a bout of measles falls into Mother Radcliffe’s hands. Nanda’s romantic creation does not find favour. In the closed world of the beautiful and the barmy, some fictions are more acceptable than others.

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3. Kenneth Widmerpool in A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell



Kenneth Widmerpool is defined at the outset by the wrong kind of overcoat. His first appearance, as he hobbles through a misty Thames Valley on the way back from a solitary run, sets the tone. His more savvy contemporaries see him as pompous, but Powell’s 12-novel cycle gives this academic and sporting nonentity if not the last laugh, then at least the scope to turn into a mild success in worldly terms. With his thick lips and metal-rimmed spectacles, he’s no one’s friend, but continues to crop up – as Etonians do. The slavishness and absence of imagination that made him a joke at school turn out to be just the ticket with the English establishment. Who would have guessed?



4. Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark



Up to Edinburgh and to Miss Brodie’s special set at Marcia Blaine School. I’ve picked Sandy Stranger, with her “little screwed-up eyes” and immaculate enunciation. All five girls are mesmerised by their charismatic teacher but Stranger alone has the cross-examining skills to whittle out facts. Extracurricular study of the Sunday newspapers gives her insight into adult impurity and helps reveal the truth of Miss Brodie’s relations with Mr Lloyd, the art master (vicarious), and Mr Lowther the music master (real but unsatisfying). The uncovering brings diminishment: sadness as well as pleasure. Through Spark’s glorious technical feat of interleaving the past with the future, we discover what becomes of them all. Sandy Stranger takes holy orders.



5. Charles Fox in The Young Desire It by Kenneth Mackenzie



The temperature is hotter for Charles Fox, and not just because his boarding school is in western Australia. I have lost Spark’s cool stare and am pressed against boys. “The folding doors were closed; the classroom was half its previous size” when they assault fourteen-year-old Charles on a table to check if he’s a girl. Penworth, a young classics master fresh out of Oxford and 10,000 miles from home, also spots his beauty. The befriending that follows consoles and repels. Embarrassment, rage, frustration, bewilderment all occur, as in adult life, but at a slower pace, drawn out over long days. Trapped for several years in this outpost of Englishness, Charles yearns for freedom – the “it” of the title.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlotte Gainsbourg in the 1996 film adaptation of Jane Eyre. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Miramax

6. Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë



“Send me to school soon, Mrs Reed, for I hate to live here.” This is said in defiance, because the plan is already in train. Jane is admirably direct. She is packed off to Lowood Institution for orphans. The long, mysterious journey to reach the place, the setting in a forest dell, a “fog-bed of pestilence”, Mr Brocklehurst, the evil benefactor, Miss Temple the good headmistress – these are fairytale ingredients, but Jane is her own person, alive and spontaneous. Her experience and witness of cruelty is sharp. Who could forget the episode when, having accidentally broken a slate, she is made to stand on a stool, while Brocklehurst publically humiliates her? Jane feels every sting but is not crushed.

7. Törless in The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil



At night, in the attic of a military academy, a boy is repeatedly tortured by two power-crazed schoolmates; a third, Törless, is drawn in and participates – up to a point. His equivocation is the hinge of the novel. Daytime reality of uninspired teaching and sensible letters from parents hints at a safer world but does little to offset the agonising. In asides and glimpses, Musil intimates that adulthood, like school, might be the same “everlasting waiting for something you don’t know anything about” – but with the senses more blunted.

8. Claudine in Claudine at School by Colette



The child safeguarding team would be run off their feet in Montigny. The place squirms with inappropriate behaviour. Motherless Claudine, with her unworldly, mollusc-fixated Papa, chooses to attend the local elementary school rather than go off to a lycée or convent with the other middle-class daughters of the village. The girls stitch lingerie, the boys turn table legs. Claudine falls for Mademoiselle Lanthenay, but loses her to the predatory new headmistress who swiftly installs her in her bedroom. Far from crushed by the setback, Claudine spies, gossips, entertains her friends and wards off pervy bureaucrats. She educates herself at home in peace. School is for action.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hugh Edwards as Piggy (right) in the 1963 film of Lord of the Flies Photograph: PR

9. Piggy in Lord of the Flies by William Golding



“I don’t care what they call me, so long as they don’t call me what they used to call me in school.” Once confided, the dreaded name sticks all over again. Piggy: the fat, asthmatic boy with the glasses. Having been bullied all his life, he sees no glamour in being marooned on an island with a crowd of schoolboys, sole survivors of an air attack. “Nobody knows we’re here. Your dad don’t know, nobody don’t know,” he tells Ralph, the handsome leader-type whom he shrewdly latches on to. As the boys turn malevolent in the endless, unsupervised playtime, Piggy keeps a grip on reality that is far beyond his 12 years. His tragedy is that understanding can’t save him.

10. An anonymous student in Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad



In recognition of all those pupils who changed the direction of my carefully planned lessons, I nominate as my final fictional schoolchild the faceless adolescent whose “aggressive, suppressed groan” in Elias Rukla’s Norwegian literature class stops the clock at page 43 of The Wild Duck and precipitates the beginning of the end of Herr Rukla’s life. This involves an umbrella and takes up the rest of Solstad’s wild and beautifully constructed novel.

• Janet Davey’s latest novel is Another Mother’s Son (Chatto and Windus). To order it for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330-333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.