lauren's never-ending search for words to describe the vibes of specific books

[lirazel]

troisoiseaux just reread A Brief History of Montmaray, reminding me of the existence of this series, which got my mind to churning.

There's a very specific sub-genre of books written for bookish teenage girls that I need a name for. They're either set in or written in a previous era (usually late Victorian to WWII), usually in the UK though occasionally in the US (though some have scenes set elsewhere, especially in Ibbotson). They're self-indulgent but well-written, focus on the inner lives of their heroines, are chock-full of lovely period details, and have a sense of whimsy without going too far into the precious or twee. They're often more episodic than plot-driven. The characters are always well-drawn, eccentric, and wide-ranging in age and sometimes class, though not (sadly) in race. Honestly, the books are...very white. They are not cozy in the sense that word gets thrown around today--there's always loss or death--but they feel cozy aesthetically despite this.

Here are the examples I've come up with:

Eva Ibbotson's young adult novels (A Countess Below Stairs, A Company of Swans, The Morning Gift, A Song for Summer, Magic Flutes)
I Capture the Castle
The Montmaray Journals
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion
the Gone-Away Lake books (this duology is an outlier in that it's MG and has a male co-protagonist, but they feel this way in my memory, though admittedly I haven't reread them in 20 years)
Daddy Long-legs

Strangely, I would not include L.M. Montgomery's books in these categories, except, maybe, The Blue Castle? I don't know why, but the vibe is different enough to me that they don't belong in this category.

O Caldeonia is this genre taken and turned sharper and crueler. It's this genre with an edge.

[eta] This is a sub-set of the Special Girl genre articulated by qian below. To me, Ibbotson is the epitome of this genre. It's got a glittering-ness to it that sets it apart from things like Little Women and Montgomery (The Blue Castle aside. Maybe it feels almost fairytale-adjacent? Like, the world they're operating in has things like crumbling castles, dukes (though they may be driving taxis now, as in Ibbotson), a kind of air of not-realism to the world they're operating in even if the emotions of our main character are realistic. Like I have to accept that I'm in a different world with different laws for how things work and to complain about the way things work would be as silly as complaining about how things work in a fantasy novel. They are the spiritual children of Frances Hodgson Burnett.



So my questions are:

a) what should we call this genre?

and

b) does anyone have any other titles they think belong in it? I'd like to compose a list and also I would like to read those books because this genre exists for me specifically and I eat it up with a spoon.