Yes thebody that's exactly the kind of escapism it is for me too, now. I know we've discussed before the extremely problematic nature of Jack and Jem dosing their wives and it absolutely is - but oh my god, some days I would kill for someone to take complete control and force me to rest, because I am so tired but can't quite justify taking responsibility for deciding myself that a day (or week 
) in bed is what I must have. I suspect I wouldn't really like the reality (in any case, I have a distinct lack of partner - doctor or otherwise) but it's a very compelling fantasy.
I certainly didn't think of it this way at all as a child reader, and I don't think it's something put in there deliberately (even when it relates to a child character - I think all those girls who burst into tears in Miss Annersley's office and get taken off to bed to "have their sleep out" is the same pattern) but I think it makes perfect sense from what we know about EBD's life, that it would slip in there somewhere. Who better than a lifelong working spinster to idealise all those masterful doctor-men?
For me it was also escapism as a child. I read school stories indiscriminately and loved them - they seemed so exciting and so far removed from my own reality. I (thought I) loved the idea of boarding school and all their odd customs and mealtimes and gymslips. I suspect there would have been a different kind of escapism for more contemporary child readers? The foreign locations and the amazing food (esp in contrast to wartime/postwar Britain) must have made it pretty much as exotic then as it seemed to me in the 1990s.
I think her characters were beautifully fleshed out, though I was thinking on the way to nursery this morning how that changes over the series: for me, her very best schoolgirl characters are the earliest (Jo to some extent, but more especially Grizel, Juliet and Cornelia), then she moves into more likeable-but-samey territory (often these were my favourites as a girl who imagined being their friends - Daisy, Gay, Jacynth, Bride, Tom, the various Chesters and Lucys etc), then finally into a quite episodic style where characters only seem to take much of a role for a single book, unless they're Mary-Lou or the trips.
Her mistresses seem to peak a little bit later - apart from Madge, her earliest ones are a bit hard to get a proper sense of IMO (Mlle Lepattre, Miss Maynard, Miss Carthew) - it's a few books in before you see the arrival of Bill, Miss Annersley and Miss Stewart who become quite dominant for the rest of the Tyrolean books. And then eventually they all become likeable but almost identical Old Girls, who always temper justice with mercy, are strict in lessons but poppets out of them, and marry doctors. I don't think Con Stewart, who is supposedly popular without being particularly fair or poppet-like, would have been written in the later books.
And her non-schoolgirl, non-mistress characters tend to blur into each other - identikit doctors, Anna-Rosli-Rosa, Karen the cook who manages to clone herself so she can be in both schools at once etc.
Should we be moving out of AIBU for the next thread? In spite of MNHQ's abject failure to provide a purpose-built new Chalet for us?