Excerpt from Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Mademoiselle de Poitiers, who taught dancing and French conversation and attended to the boarders' wardrobes, was bustling about in a fever of delighted anticipation. Like her charges she wore a simple muslin dress in which she contrived to look elegant by the addition of a wide ribbon belt and shady straw hat. Only a few years older than some of the senior boarders, she was equally enchanted at the prospect of escaping from the suffocating routine of the College for a whole long summer day, and ran here and there amongst the girls assembling for a final roll call on the front verandah.

'Depêchez-vous, mes enfants, depêchez-vous. Tais-toi, Irma,' chirped the light canary voice of Mademoiselle, for whom la petite Irma could do no wrong. The girl's voluptuous little breasts, her dimples, full red lips, naughty black eyes and glossy black ringlets, were a continual source of aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes in the dingy schoolroom the Frenchwoman, brought up amongst the great European galleries, would look up from her desk and see her against a background of cherries and pineapples, cherubs and golden flagons, surrounded by elegant young men in velvets and satins ... 'Tais-toi, Irma ... Miss McCraw vient d'arriver.' A gaunt female figure in a puce-coloured pelisse was emerging from the outdoor 'dunnie', an earth-closet reached by a secluded path edged with begonias. The governess walked at her usual measured pace, uninhibited as Royalty, and with an almost royal dignity. Nobody had ever seen her in a hurry, or without her steel-rimmed spectacles.

Greta McCraw had undertaken to take on picnic duty today, assisted by Mademoiselle, purely as a matter of conscience. A brilliant mathematician – far too brilliant for her poorly paid job at the College – she would have given a five pound note to have spent this precious holiday, no matter how fine, shut up in her room with that fascinating new treatise on the Calculus. A tall woman with dry ochre skin and coarse greying hair perched like an untidy bird's nest on top of her head, she had remained oblivious to the vagaries of the Australian scene despite a residence of thirty years. Climate meant nothing, nor fashion, nor the never ending miles of gum trees and dry yellow grass, of which she was hardly more aware than of the mists and mountains of her native Scotland, as a girl. The boarders, used to her outlandish wardrobe, were no longer amused, and her choice for today's picnic went without comment – the well known church-going toque and black laced boots, together with the puce-coloured pelisse, in which her bony frame took on the proportions of one of her own Euclidian triangles, and a pair of rather shabby puce kid gloves.

Mademoiselle, on the other hand, as an admired arbiter of fashion, was minutely examined and passed with honours, down to the turquoise ring and white silk gloves.

'Although,' said Blanche, 'I'm surprised at her letting Edith go out in those larky blue ribbons. Whatever is Edith looking at over there?'

A pasty-faced fourteen-year-old with the contours of an overstuffed bolster was standing a few feet away, staring up at the window of a room on the first floor. Miranda tossed back her straight corn-coloured hair, smiling and waving at a pale little pointed face looking dejectedly down at the animated scene below.

'It's not fair,' said Irma, waving and smiling too, 'after all the child is only thirteen. I never thought Mrs A. would be so mean.'

Miranda sighed: 'Poor little Sara – she wanted so much to go to the picnic.'

Failure to recite 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' yesterday had condemned the child Sara Waybourne to solitary confinement upstairs. Later, she would pass the sweet summer afternoon in the empty schoolroom, committing the hated masterpiece to memory. The College was already, despite its brief existence, quite famed for its discipline, deportment and mastery of English literature.

Excerpted from Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. Copyright © 2017 by Joan Lindsay. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Classics. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.