Frances Arabella Rowden

Reading Abbey Girls' School, or iterations of this establishment under similar names, achieved notability in the nineteenth century. The St Quentins, a husband and wife team, were associated with several girls' schools in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Many of their pupils went on to make a mark on English culture and society, particularly as writers. The most famous was Jane Austen, who used their school in Reading, Berkshire as a model of "a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school".

George Butt, sometime Chaplain-in-Ordinary to George III, sent his only son to his great friend Richard Valpy, headmaster of Reading Grammar School. On a visit to the town in 1790, he was favourably impressed by the girls' school, and decided to send his elder daughter as parlour boarder, a cut above the ordinary boarder. Mary Butt, later known as the prolific author Mrs Sherwood, devoted two chapters of her memoirs to her schooldays in the 1790s, giving a detailed portrait of life at this long-established boarding school.

Two buildings of Reading Abbey survived the Dissolution of the monasteries, the Hospitium, and the Inner Gateway. The latter, and a more modern building attached to it, housed the girls' establishment, which was thus known as the Abbey School or the Gateway School. (The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography callls it "Reading Ladies boarding-school".) It had its own garden, overlooking the open ground of abbey ruins known as the Forbury, where the boys played. The girls' school dates to before 1755, when Lydia Bell took on as assistant her sister Sarah Hackett, who later chose to call herself Mrs Latournelle, despite being English and unmarried. Bell bequeathed the school to her sister, whose skills lay more as a housekeeper than a teacher. A Miss Pitts, who was there as a parlour boarder, suffered a reversal of fortune and ended up taking partnership of the school.

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