Coming Home (1995), by Rosamunde Pilcher, tells the story of fourteen-year-old Judith Dunbar, who stays in England at Saint Ursula's boarding school when her mother and younger sister leave to join her father in Singapore. She and a friend grow up under the looming threat of World War II, which will eventually change their lives and the lives of those they love most.

Muriel Spark's novel The Girls of Slender Means (1963), tells the World War II story of a boarding house founded for "the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the Age of Thirty Years." The boarding house's residents go to their jobs, dream of marriage, gossip, and maintain a facade that life and the world are still normal despite the war.

Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) tells the story of Stephen Mary Gordon...