The allure of novels set inside the high school classroom

What is it about these books that draws me in?

Whether it’s by instinct or training, I’m forever interested in hearing what kinds of books people enjoy, and why they enjoy them. And I’m no less interested when that person is me.

This spring I happened to read several books in quick succession that featured protagonists who were high school teachers. I suppose it wasn’t a surprise that I enjoyed all three books, as I’ve raved about the authors’ previous works. But I was intrigued by the common thread, and wondered if it was meaningful.

I have a strong history of enjoying stories—both fiction and non—that focus on people at work. And every kind of work, it seems: the memoir Trash! from this year’s Summer Reading Guide, the 2024 thriller The North Line about an Alaskan fishing crew, Here One Moment and its actuary protagonist, any number of books set in the world of publishing.

And furthermore—these books are not just about what it’s like to do the work, but how the doing of the work shapes the protagonists. That shaping aspect was very much on display in the three recent teacher novels I loved.

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The first such teacher novel was Ann Patchett’s June release Whistler. (Whistler is a 2026 MMD Summer Reading Guide minimalist pick.) Patchett’s novels often dwell on the details of her characters’ work lives; here, her protagonist, 53-year-old Daphne, teaches high school English at a private all-girls school in New York City. Daphne doesn’t just happen to be a teacher, and her discipline doesn’t just happen to be English: she’s a teacher to her core, often reflecting on past classroom experiences with her students and the works she taught them. She is who she is in no small part because she teaches English to teenagers.

There are no classroom scenes in this novel, but Daphne often references her time at school, recounting snippets about her life there, specifics interactions with her students, the books she enjoyed teaching and why. Books were constantly referenced in this novel—a not unexpected delight in a book about an English teacher.

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The next teacher book I came to was Elizabeth Strout’s May release The Things We Never Say. (The Things We Never Say is a 2026 MMD Summer Reading Guide selection.) This story takes place in a small coastal Massachusetts town; protagonist Artie Dam’s discipline is history. Like Whistler’s Daphne, Artie is the man he is in no small part because he teaches history to teenagers.

Classroom conversations factor heavily into this book. We all know the dictum “show don’t tell;” in these pages, Strout reveals Artie’s character—what moves him, what he thinks about, how he views the world and his place in it—through his interactions with and privately expressed concerns for his students. In Artie’s handling of a difficult conversation, an episode of bullying, and a parent’s complaint we see a man who, while not without hope for his students, is often dismayed and frightened by what he sees. And when Strout showed me, the reader, what he chooses to do next because of these experiences, I believed her. The actions felt true to the man I’d seen at work.

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Finally I came to the first published novel of the trio, Lily King’s 2005 novel The English Teacher. Vida teaches English to high schoolers at a New England prep school, where she lives quietly on campus with her son Peter and their dog, as she’s done for fifteen years now, since just before Peter was born. Vida’s identity and entire life are bound up with reading and teaching literature.

That life-bound-up-with-books may sound lovely, and in many ways, it is. But for Vida, it’s also a first-rate coping mechanism. To her, the world feels like too much to meet head-on, so she finds a way to avoid experiencing her life directly, instead filtering her experience through the novels she loves. Vida has her reasons—and readers will certainly have her suspicions. They will be revealed in time.

At school, Vida is competent and caring. More than that: she is beloved. She’s been named teacher of the year numerous times; her students happily clomp up the stairs each day to her isolated quarters on the top floor to read and discuss classic novels. Vida loves teaching these old books: experiencing the joy of revisiting old familiar friends year after year, and also seeing them anew each time.

But everything changes when she impulsively accepts the proposal of a handsome young widower and moves off campus, into town, and into the role of working mother to three new stepchildren who dearly miss their not-long-deceased mother. And—perhaps the most impossible of all—into the role of wife.

At school, as queen of the third floor, she is beloved, in her realm. But in her new husband’s realm, well. That’s another story; Vida is a whole different person apart from the world of her books.

From the wedding night forward, it’s clear to the reader that Vida’s private history has been buried for a very long time. Vida herself fails to anticipate that her marriage will make long-denied past pains impossible to ignore. And, unable to cope, she falls apart. The reasons behind her unraveling will slowly be revealed to the reader, with the help of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Let’s go back to Vida’s classroom, as it’s in these scenes that (for me) King’s prose shines brightest. Not long after the novel begins, the time comes for Vida to introduce this year’s students to Tess. It’s obvious Vida holds Tess close to her heart, though the reader won’t find out why till the end of the book. And it’s obvious that Vida takes a very particular care with her students in the teaching of Tess, a novel Vida both dearly loves, and knows to be brutal.

I so enjoyed Vida’s interactions with her teenage students; how she carefully builds their confidence, and occasionally, deliberately, dashes it. But what I most enjoyed were the scenes where, thanks to the close third point of view, we are privy to Vida’s private thoughts about books and the teaching of them, with special emphasis on Tess. How I loved these scenes, and the pleasure of considering literature from the perspective of Vida’s interesting, curious, perceptive mind.

I’m so impressed by Lily King: it seems extraordinarily difficult for a writer to portray a character standing there thinking—and thinking about an old book!—in a compelling way. Yet that’s what King does. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, because I gobbled up the conversations about books in King’s more recent works Writers & Lovers and Heart the Lover.)

“Tess is a rite of passage,” Vida tells her students. At this point I’ll confess: I have not yet read Tess, and I wonder how doing so before reading this book might have changed its meaning or my experience. But I’m grateful for the time I spent in these pages, in Vida’s classroom.

***** ***** *****

So what does all this say about the kinds of books I enjoy, and why I enjoy them? Well. The book part is easy: of course I want to read about how people are changed by what they read, and how they think about exposing their students to literature, and the interactions that happen because of and incidental to the teaching of it.

But for the rest of it: I love to see people at work, I’m fascinated by the moments that change them. Plenty of that is in offer in these books. But for the classroom, specifically? I welcome your thoughts and theories. But I wonder how much has to do with the simultaneous familiarity and foreignness of entering the high school classroom on the page. I spent four years there, as a student; I’ve never spent a day in one as a teacher. Perhaps it’s the opportunity to enter a familiar place with fresh eyes that keeps bringing me (and you?) back to these books.

Please tell me your experience with teachers on the page in comments. I’d love to hear your reflections, and additional titles you would recommend.

And if you enjoy these sorts of books, I’ve gathered some I particularly enjoyed below.

8 novels with teacher protagonists

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Teach Me (There’s Something About Marysburg #1)

Author: Olivia Dade

I've enjoyed Olivia Dade's contemporary romance in the past; I'm told this particular book will make me laugh and cry. High school teacher Rose Owen summons her inner Ice Queen when Martin Krause is hired at her school and the administrator reassigns her beloved world history classes to him instead. Except Martin proves to be a genuinely warm and interesting man who is difficult to resist. They’re both divorced, in their forties, and great history teachers. Rose grew up poor and wants students to have the same life-changing opportunities she did. It's evident in these pages that Rose and Martin both care deeply about their students, whether teaching history lessons or giving them a listening ear after class. Bonus for me: the town is set in the college town of Marysburg, a fictional Williamsburg Virginia—where I lived for a time, but hardly ever get to read about in contemporary fiction. More info →

Whistler

Author: Ann Patchett

In Patchett’s graceful latest, 53-year-old Daphne reunites with a man who once loomed large in her world: her former stepfather Eddie, who was briefly married to her mother when Daphne was nine. Eddie vanished from her life after the two were in a terrible car wreck and Daphne never understood why. The joyful chance reunion gives them an opportunity to make up for lost time, and for Daphne to finally make sense of the past. This wistful tale explores the agony of impossible choices, the limits of love, and how we make peace with our loved ones. Set in the world of publishing and steeped in books and art, and containing frequent reflections on Daphne's past time in the classroom teaching literature, this 2026 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide pick is a shoe-in for my Best Books of 2026. More info →

The Things We Never Say

Author: Elizabeth Strout

Strout’s tenth novel is her first without ties to Crosby, Maine and features an entirely new cast of characters. At its center is Artie Dam, a well-liked history teacher and community pillar enduring a private crisis, feeling lonely and disconnected from family and friends. Artie doesn't like what he sees of the world when he looks around, and he fears for the future that awaits his high school students. When a shocking secret about his family is revealed, it pushes Artie to the breaking point. But comfort is found in surprising places, and it’s deeply reassuring to watch Artie find it. I don’t tend to like books that directly engage contemporary politics, but this one won me over: I find myself thinking about this story and its characters long after turning the last page. More info →

Enormous Wings

Author: Laurie Frankel

Pepper doesn’t want to move into Austin’s Vista View retirement home: she wants her autonomy and doesn’t want to live under the same roof as her ex-husband, who’s already a resident. But to placate her three grown children, she moves in, and finds —it isn’t so bad. She makes friends! She falls in love! And then, despite having gone through menopause a quarter-century before, she falls pregnant. It can’t be possible—and certainly not safe—for a 77-year-old woman to successfully carry a pregnancy. But this is Texas, and she doesn’t have any medical options except to wait and see what happens next. This warm-hearted story is both cautionary tale and caper, a road trip story, and a poignant meditation on love through changing seasons. The book benefits greatly from the levity that comes from frequent humor, much of which comes courtesy of jokes and reflections from the two seasoned protagonists on their long-ago experiences in the classroom: his teaching history, hers teaching English. More info →

A Prayer for Owen Meany

Author: John Irving

Irving is a masterful storyteller, and has a knack for drawing compelling characters. During a Little League game, 11-year-old Owen Meany hits a foul ball, resulting in a terrible accident. What follows is the coming-of-age story of an incredibly rich character. We see Johnny and his unusual best friend Owen grow up and attend the prep school where Johnny’s stepfather teaches, before Owen heads off to ROTC as the Vietnam War escalates. Later, Johnny becomes a teacher himself. John is always trying to get his students at the all-girls school to go beyond the surface of the books he teaches them. He despairs how they miss half the wit in this book or that and that they fixate on Heathcliff and Cathy instead of the larger themes of Wuthering Heights. This goes back to Owen, who figured out Johnny was dyslexic and taught Johnny how to love literature. Johnny winds up finding so much solace in books and what we can learn from them that he wants all of his students to have the same experience. More info →

Anne of Windy Poplars

Author: L.M. Montgomery

The fourth Anne of Green Gables book sees twenty-two-year-old Anne Shirley move to the seaside town of Summerside, PEI to take the principal position at Summerside High. Little does she know the Pringle family runs the town, and—because one of their own was passed over for the position—they resolve from the moment she’s hired to sabotage her efforts. Anne boards with two friendly widows at a home called Windy Poplars on Spook’s Lane (a “delicious” address, says Anne) and makes herself at home in the community and the classroom. Much of this story is told in letters from Anne to her fiancé Gilbert Blythe; shorter sections are told more traditionally, but the pages are full of amusing encounters both in and out of the classroom. More info →

The English Teacher

Author: Lily King

I'm continuing to slowly make my way through Lily King's backlist—maybe she'll become a completist author for me?—and picked up her second novel, published in 2005, on impulse. It's a campus novel, with huge chunks set at a New England prep school. The titular English teacher is Vida, who talked herself into a job at the school fifteen years ago, when she was hugely pregnant and in desperate financial straits that she implied were due to her husband's death, except there never was a husband. She is beloved by her students and coworkers, and has built a quiet but happy enough life there with her son. But when she impulsively accepts a handsome young widower's proposal, she is forced to finally confront everything she fled from long ago. I enjoyed the story, but what really stood out to me was the way Lily King can show a character thinking about and wrestling with a book on the page and make it feel not only utterly fascinating but deeply essential to the plot. (The book that appears most often in these pages is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.) I loved this. More info →

One Day author Nicholls delivers a quiet and unconventional post-pandemic tale in this 2024 Summer Reading Guide selection about two lonely middle-aged people falling in love as they trek through the English countryside. Geography teacher Michael and copyeditor Marnie, both still hurting in the aftermath of unhappy marriages that ended, meet for a group walk across the moors arranged by a bossy mutual friend. No one thinks they have anything in common—and yet when thrown together on the trail, they discover the sort of companionship they never dreamed they’d find again. Grammar nerds and Anglophiles will find a special pleasure in this bittersweet work of contemporary fiction that made me laugh so hard I shook the whole couch; many funny moments involves Michael's classroom memories. More info →

What are your favorite novels with teacher protagonists? Please share in the comments.

P.S. 25 boarding school novels that are better than your class reunion, 10 campus novels that will take you back to your school days, and 20 MORE campus novels that will take you back to your school days.