Morag Edwards / Isobel Ross, "Almost Boys: The Psychology of Co-Ed Boarding in the 1960s"

 

Before retiring, Morag Edwards had worked as an educational psychologist for over thirty years, with a career focus on children who had experienced early relationship trauma and neglect. She was a published author before leaving work but the demands of family and professional life meant that her writing ambitions, while powerful and enduring, had always remained stuck within the margins of her life. Morag now writes historical fiction as Morag Edwards and is published by Bloodhound Books. The third volume in her Jacobite trilogy, The Jacobite’s Heir, is due to be published in September 2025. Morag writes contemporary fiction as Isobel Ross, also published by Bloodhound Books, and is working hard on completing another domestic suspense novel. 

Morag recently gave a talk at Literary Leicester Festival 2025, as part of the "Bullying, School and Power" event, along with James Scudamore and Jonathan Taylor. You can listen to the podcast of the event here.  

About Almost Boys, by Morag Edwards / Isobel Ross
Morag was a pupil at a co-educational boarding school in Scotland from 1965 to 1971. Unique about this school was that boy boarders far outnumbered girl boarders and by the late 1960s, the adults in charge had become confused about their duty of care. She now uses her background to help others understand the psychological implications of early boarding for young children and actively campaigns to end early boarding. 

Under the author name Isobel Ross, Morag has written a memoir about her own boarding school experience: Almost Boys: The Psychology of Co-Ed Boarding in the 1960s. The narrative is based upon her memories and diaries written between 1969 and 1971, embedded within the framework of developmental psychology, Attachment Theory and Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs). The memoir was self-published early in 2024, in order to catch a growing wave of concern that young children were still sent away from their families to be educated. This proved to be the right decision, as Morag has regularly been asked to appear on podcasts, webinars and speak at conferences, providing a voice for women ex-boarders, particularly those who attended co-ed establishments, currently under-represented in the growing boarding school literature. 

From Almost Boys
In my first winter living in Fairview, I wouldn’t hurry back to the boarding house after school. Instead, I stayed behind in the dusk, on the school steps, watching the day girls amble towards their lamp-lit homes, chattering in groups. I felt an aching hunger for a place that might feel homely. Even without a parent actually present, the parents’ homemaking would create a continuity of care for these girls. There would be a gas or electric fire, a television, a tin of biscuits, coats and shoes in the hall. During term time, I struggled to remember my home, even though my older sister was now a boarder. It seemed to exist behind an opaque wall, a place that never truly came into focus. School was real and vivid, each moment lived in the present but couldn’t be talked about at home. My parents’ interest was limited and explanations of the cultural minutiae felt too lengthy and complicated. Unsure and lacking confidence about their decision to send us away, once we were at home it was clear they did not want to hear about our lives at school, embedding and reinforcing the gap between our home selves and our school personalities. 

Linda Gask, "Out of Her Mind: How We Are Failing Women's Mental Health and What Must Change"

Linda Gask is a retired consultant psychiatrist and academic at the University of Manchester and also the author of two memoirs about her own experience of mental illness, The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir of Depression and of moving to live in Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, and Finding True North: The Healing Power of Place. She is also a lifelong feminist. 

About Out of Her Mind, by Linda Gask
Despite advances in our understanding of mental health, women and girls are still disproportionately disadvantaged when it comes to addressing the real causes and consequences of their mental health problems such as depression and self-harm. 

Why are they hurting so much today and why is it so hard for them to find the kind of help they really need? What is happening in a health care system overburdened by demand? Why have so many women and girls lost faith in mental health care? Are women, once again, being forgotten? 

Drawing on many new interviews with women of all ages and backgrounds who tell her their stories, expert commentators, current events, recent history and her personal and professional experience, Linda Gask examines how society, mental health care and even feminism are failing women’s mental health. 

And above all she answers the questions "What must change?" and "What can we all do?"

You can read more about Out of Her Mind on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From Out of Her Mind

"Men are the losers now": Discuss.

Manchester 2016. An email arrived out of the blue asking if I would like to take part in a debate for Women’s Week.

"Why me?"

"Because you know the facts – you are an academic."

But I’m also a psychiatrist.

"OK, so which side do you want me to speak for?"

I didn’t really want to argue for the motion but knew I could make a case for it if I had to. A good one. For two decades we have been bombarding men across the world to try to get them to talk about their feelings before it’s too late. The suicide rate for men in the UK is three times the rate for women. It has always been higher for men but since the crash in 2008 and the recession that followed, it hasn’t just been young men who have been taking their own lives – the greatest rise for suicide is in middle-aged men who not only lose their self-esteem, but also sometimes their will to live when their jobs disappear, and their relationships break down. How we feel about ourselves and the way in which the world treats us has a significant impact on our mental health. It is key to our sense of wellbeing, and it can be very hard for men; but that’s not the whole story. Many women are desperate too and women really are still losing out disproportionately, particularly in the mental health stakes.

"We have speakers for the motion," came the reply. "We’d like you to second on the other side."

Assuaging the slight dent to my ego at not being asked to lead with a huge dollop of relief that I wouldn’t have to speak first, I agreed to do it. Because women are still suffering with their mental health and are not being heard ...

Stephanie Carty, "The Writing Mirror: Analyse Your Writing for Self-Discovery"

 

Dr Stephanie Carty is a writer and clinical psychologist in the U.K. Her short fiction has been published widely and been shortlisted or won prizes in Bath Short Story Award, Bridport Prize, Bristol Short Story Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and Bath Flash Fiction Award. Her novella Three Sisters of Stone won a Saboteur Award and her short fiction collection The Peculiarities of Yearning won best published collection in the Eyelands Book Prize. She has published a psychological thriller Shattered and a workbook for writers on the psychology of characters Inside Fictional Minds.

About The Writing Mirror, by Dr Stephanie Carty
The Writing Mirror is a workbook designed to investigate what, how and why you write in order to better understand yourself. It uses psychological theory and methods, through structured tasks, to aid self-discovery both related to and wider than your writing life.

Below, you can read two excerpts from the book. 

From The Writing Mirror

Distraction and procrastination

It may be that working in bite-size chunks works well for you, to slowly but surely build a whole. However, there may be some examples of this pattern that are not about slow, steady progression of the tortoise versus the chaotic hare, but that in fact boil down to avoidance.

Watch out if your history tries to get you to label avoidance as laziness! Avoidance and procrastination are often an attempt at self-protection. That can be hard to understand when part of you is desperate to finish your writing. But think about all the potential risks that your mind may invent – will your writing disappoint you, will it disappoint others, is it too personal to share, have you felt pushed into writing something that isn’t what your heart sings in order to increase the chance of publication? And quietly, oh, so quietly, you may have a mind that whispers, you don’t deserve success.

Making do

If perfectionism doesn’t chime for you, perhaps your pattern of thinking tells you what you’ve just completed ‘will do’ and you quickly move on from it before it is polished. You may tell yourself that it’s better to keep trying different things rather than get bogged down on one idea, or that the chances of publication are low, so you don’t want to overinvest in one project, or that the writing is only for your own satisfaction. ‘I threw my hat in the ring at the last minute,’ ‘this isn’t my best,’ ‘I’m just practising what it feels like to submit’ and so on. The act of avoiding ‘aiming high’ brings its own protection: if the work isn’t accepted, shortlisted, read or published or doesn’t sell well, you can tell yourself that it didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t your full effort. This way, your brain is cocooned to some extent from the sense of rejection it dreads. But is it worth the price of missing out on the satisfaction and possibilities that your best work could bring?

Stephanie Carty, "Inside Fictional Minds"

 

Dr Stephanie Carty is a writer, trainer and NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist living in Gloucestershire. She runs sell-out courses called Psychology of Character and offers character clinics to authors. Her short fiction is widely published and has been shortlisted and placed in competitions including Bristol Short Story Prize, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and the Bridport Prize. Her novella-in-flash Three Sisters of Stone won Best Novella in the Saboteur Awards. She is represented by Curtis Brown. Her website is here.

About Inside Fictional Minds, by Dr Stephanie Carty

With a focus on practical application, Inside Fictional Minds provides a summary  of psychological approaches to understanding and developing characters. A wide range of topics and tasks aims to help the writer uncover why their characters act as they do and how to take the reader of this journey of discovery. 

You can find more details about the book on the publisher's website here.

Below, you can read an extract from the book. 

From Inside Fictional Minds

Narcissism

If you have a narcissistic character in your story you may find it useful to consider what lies beneath the apparent self-belief.

A narcissistic character will act as if they are superior to everyone else. They believe they should be revered and get what they want without any effort as they are special. They have superficial relationships that exist only to gain admiration.

However, this can be viewed as a ‘mask’ that the character wears to protect themselves. Underneath, they are fragile with an intense focus on how others view them. They can’t tolerate being a ‘normal’ person who may make mistakes, not be highly regarded by everyone or show any needs. They constantly belittle others and seek praise in order to avoid any painful truths getting through about their lack of ‘special’ status.

If this sounds like your character, then they may have ended up that way through two different paths. One is a spoilt child who was given everything, not taught limits or to follow rules, and lavishly praised by parents despite making no effort. They learnt to expect to be treated as ‘special’ which is not how the real world operates. The other path is those who couldn’t meet the high expectations of their parents and learnt to cover their shame at feeling not good enough by lying, boasting and inventing the mask of being ‘special.’

• If you have a character with narcissistic qualities, does your story show their intense focus on others’ view of them? 
• Do you have or could you add key scenes that show a time when the reality of them not being ‘special’ threatens to rise to awareness, so they step up their narcissistic behaviours or use another defence mechanism to avoid this? 
• Considering the two pathways above, what was the route to your character developing these traits?