The Chalet School Revisited
Page 1
THE CHALET SCHOOL REVISITED
EDITED BY
ROSEMARY AUCHMUTY & JU GOSLING
Bettany Press
1994
First published by Bettany Press 1994.
Reprinted 2004.
8 Kildare Road, London E16 4AD
This eversion published 2011.
© Bettany Press 1994
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978 1 908304 13 1
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
Notes on Contributors
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction ROSEMARY AUCHMUTY AND JU GOSLING
I. In Search of Elinor HELEN McCLELLAND
II. Excitements for the Chalet Fans POLLY GOERRES
III. The Literary Context SHEILA RAY
IV. “School with bells on!” The school at the Chalet and beyond JU GOSLING
V. The Chalet School Guides. Girls’ Organisations and Girls’ School Stories ROSEMARY AUCHMUTY
VI. My God, It’s the Head! JUDITH HUMPHREYS
VII. The Series Factor SUE SIMS
VIII. Confessions of a Chalet School Collector GILL BILSKI
IX. Images of the Chalet School. Dust Wrappers, Covers and Illustrations CLARISSA CRIDLAND
Appendix: Books by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Rosemary Auchmuty was born in Egypt in 1950 to an American mother and Irish father, and grew up in Australia. She was educated at Newcastle Girls’ High School (where she became School Captain) and the Australian National University (from which she obtained a Ph.D. in history in 1975). She moved to London in 1978, and now teaches history and women’s studies at the University of Westminster. She has published two school textbooks and many articles on women’s history, and contributed two chapters to the Lesbian History Group’s book, Not a Passing Phase (Women’s Press, 1989). She has also published a number of short stories. An avid reader of girls’ school stories since the age of nine, in 1992 her study of girls’ school stories, A World of Girls, was published by the Women’s Press.
Gill Bilski was born in Middlesex in 1956 and became an avid reader of the Chalet School books at the age of 10. Married with two daughters (neither of whom read the Chalet School!), she is a leading seller of second-hand children’s books and a Committee member of Friends of the Chalet School. She also runs a large Guide company, and in her very limited spare time enjoys watching Australian soap operas, listening to cricket on the radio, making tapestries and of course reading!
Clarissa Cridland was born in Guildford in 1955. She attended two boarding schools, neither of which was anything like the Chalet School. On leaving school she spent a year in Paris followed by a year’s teacher training, but soon found that her real vocation lay in publishing. For the past 17 years she has worked for a variety of companies, ending as the director responsible for rights and contracts at Pan Macmillan Children’s Books before going freelance in 1994. A voracious Chalet School reader from the age of ten, the books remain her favourites today, although she also collects other children’s books. She now lives in Somerset with Friends of the Chalet School founder Ann Mackie-Hunter.
Polly Goerres was born in Leamington Spa in 1963 and educated at the King’s High School for Girls, Warwick and the University of Sheffield. A Brent-Dyer fan from the age of ten, she wrote an undergraduate dissertation on the Chalet School series, and even spent her honeymoon in Pertisau am Achensee. Although presently working for Jaguar cars, much of Polly’s time is devoted to her work as a Committee member of Friends of the Chalet School. She also enjoys travelling all over the country to watch football, (sometimes accompanied by a talking donkey) and to search for The School by the River.
Ju Gosling was born in Essex in 1962 and attended Colchester County High School for Girls. Although her happiest day at school was the one when she left, she has spent the last six years studying girls’ school stories. In 1992 she was awarded an M. A. by the University of East London for her thesis on representations of girls and women in the Chalet School. She is currently researching the reasons for the popularity of girls’ school stories for a Ph.D. in Communication and Image Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and hopes to present her findings as a multi-media hypertext. A journalist by profession, she has worked extensively in the media.
Judith Humphreys was born in Wales in 1947 and spent the 1960s at a girls’ grammar school. She loved school, both for the intellectual stimulation and for the friendships with girls and staff, and ended as Head Girl. It seemed natural for her to continue into teaching (although teaching French in the local comprehensive is a somewhat different experience!). When her children were small, she was also involved in Development Education and in writing French courses for the Longman Group. A committed and practising Christian, she discovered feminism 12 years ago; since then she has rediscovered the Chalet School books which she collected avidly in her youth. She believes that the books celebrate female autonomy and female friendship, and is currently developing her analysis into a Ph.D. for the Open University.
Helen McClelland was born and educated in Scotland, migrating southwards in the late 1940s to pursue her musical studies in London and Paris. As a busy professional cellist she has played at concerts in many parts of the world, and currently teaches at the Royal College of Music in Manchester. Her love of writing dates from around the age of eight, but it was not until the 1970s that her special interest in the phenomenom of “Chaletomania” led to the writing of Behind the Chalet School — her biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer — and her two other Chalet books. She is married to pianist Alexander Kelly, has two daughers, and adopted the name Helen McClelland from her maternal grandmother.
Sheila Ray graduated from the University of Leeds in 1951, trained as a librarian and then specialised in work with children and young people. From 1968 she taught at the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, and since taking early retirement in 1983 she has lectured in children’s literature and school librarianship as a freelance. She has been British associate editor for Bookbird (1973-93) and assistant editor of Children’s Literature Abstracts (1973-91), and is currently editor of the School Librarian and a contributor to and book reviewer for a variety of librarianship and children’s literature journals. An honorary fellow of the Library Association, in 1980 she was awarded an M.Phil. for her thesis on Enid Blyton, published as The Blyton Phenomenom (1982).
Sue Sims was born in London in 1952 and read English at Oxford. She then taught in various comprehensive and grammar schools, including King Edward’s High School for Girls in Birmingham which had about 50 Brent-Dyers including A Quintette in Queensland and the original Chalet School and Rosalie (a private arrangement with the librarian means it no longer has either). She paused her career to produce three boys (with the co-operation of her husband, Paul) and now teaches A-level English part-time at Brockenhurst College of Further Education. She also co-produces Folly, a magazine devoted to the lighter type of children’s literature, with Belinda Copson.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book; Helen McClelland’s The Chalet School Companion and Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School.
The original dust wrappers of the first six books, published by Chambers and illustrated by Nina K. Brisley.
The Chalet School and Barbara and The Chalet School Goes to It; first and paperback edition
s.
First and paperback editions of The Coming of Age of the Chalet School, The Chalet School and Richenda, Trials for the Chalet School and Theodora and the Chalet School.
First, subsequent and paperback editions of Three Go to the Chalet School and The Chalet School and the Island.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
MANY people have assisted in the preparation of The Chalet School Revisited. All the contributors did much more than simply produce their own articles: they helped in a variety of ways, from checking each other’s chapters for accuracy to obtaining permissions to use copyright material, from drawing up contracts to copying and sending out flyers. For all these efforts, the editors are very appreciative.
We especially wish to thank Chloe Rutherford and HarperCollins Armada for permission to quote and reproduce illustrations from the works of Elinor Brent-Dyer.
Our heartfelt thanks go to Joy Wotton, who copy-edited the manuscript with dedication and enthusiasm, and to Alan Slingsby for typesetting training and support. Their professional skills ensured a truly professional product.
We are grateful to all those Friends of the Chalet School who gave assistance with the processing of orders and sales and the storage and mailing out of the books, and to everyone who sent in their orders so promptly, often with encouraging messages of support, so that we knew how many books we could afford to print.
Finally, we thank Sibyl Grundberg and Nick Green for their unfailing support and patience.
The editors hope that you think our efforts have been worthwhile, and that you enjoy this book.
Rosemary Auchmuty & Ju Gosling, London 1994
INTRODUCTION
ROSEMARY AUCHMUTY AND JU GOSLING
THE Chalet School Revisited has been written to mark the centenary of the birth of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, author of the Chalet School series. Brent-Dyer’s books, so long disregarded by the critics, are now being rehabilitated, and her achievement is beginning to receive the appreciation so long overdue. The achievement is, indeed, remarkable. Elinor Brent-Dyer published no fewer than 100 books; of these, 59 made up the Chalet School series, the longest series for girls ever written and only the second longest in juvenile fiction (after the Biggles series). Some of her books have been more or less continuously in print since they were written, and by 1995 the entire Chalet School series will have been reissued in paperback, courtesy of HarperCollins Armada. While these paperbacks sell upwards of 100,000 copies every year, second-hand hardback copies change hands for £50 or even £100; some very rare titles, such as The School by the River, are in effect priceless. A score of major dealers in children’s fiction, and numerous smaller ones, now cater to the demands of hundreds of collectors, many of whom value the works of Brent-Dyer above all other children’s books. In her lifetime, Brent-Dyer had a fan club with nearly 4,000 members world-wide; today, the Friends of the Chalet School — with more than 800 members — is the largest of several organisations devoted to the appreciation of girls’ school stories and their authors.1
We should bear this achievement in mind whenever we are tempted to apologise for our interest in such a “low” form of literature — for the fact that we continue to read and enjoy the Chalet School books. For a start, we should remember that we are not alone. Elinor Brent-Dyer deserves serious critical attention not simply because she is clearly a significant social phenomenon, but because she has given us and thousands of others so much pleasure. And we should be clear in our minds that what we like is just as important as what other people like, and a great deal more important than what other people think we should like.
The school story as a literary genre
When Elinor Brent-Dyer embarked upon a writing career with Gerry Goes to School, her decision to write a school story was an obvious choice to make. In 1922 there was a strong demand for girls’ school stories. Publishers were only too eager to sign up new authors, and girls (and their mentors) could hardly get enough of them. It was a genre eminently suited to women who, like Brent-Dyer, spent a good deal of time with girls and knew what girls enjoyed, in a world where girls were still educated separately from boys and enjoyed separate leisure interests. For this reason not only Brent-Dyer but also her heroine Jo Bettany began their writing careers as authors of girls’ school stories.
That the genre was in its heyday from the 1920s to the 1950s in Britain is well-known to many adult fans, but it is a point worth making when we consider how different was the situation in, say, the 1960s, or the 1860s, or even today. A woman bent on earning her living as a writer would not now be advised to write a school story. Despite the relatively recent example of Antonia Forest and the contemporary success of Anne Digby and others, who have proved the existence of a continuing market, the modern writer would almost certainly experience difficulty in finding a publisher for a new girls’ school story.2 It is not that the girls of today won’t read them — sales figures for reprints of the Chalet School books alone belie this suggestion; rather, the critics and editors don’t like them. They associate school stories with all that is elitist, outdated and formulaic in children’s literature. The values for which the books were welcomed between the wars have become the grounds on which they are now condemned.
The main outline of the history of girls’ school stories is now well established, after decades of contemptuous neglect. The first well-known exponent was L. T. (Elisabeth Thomasina) Meade (1854-1914), who published A World of Girls in 1886, one of more than 300 novels for young people of which several had boarding school settings. But the girls’ school story did not develop into a separate genre until the beginning of the 20th century, with the publication of Angela Brazil’s first school story, The Fortunes of Philippa, in 1906. These later stories were characterised not simply by their school setting — usually but not always boarding — but also by their almost exclusively female cast of characters, their “optimism about the female state”3 and their female authorship. Brazil, who continued to publish school stories until shortly before her death in 1947, is regarded as one of the three great writers of girls’ school stories, together with Dorita Fairlie Bruce (1885-1970) and Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (1894-1969). To this group many would add the name of Elsie Jeanette Oxenham (1880-1960).4
Dorita Fairlie Bruce wrote 39 novels between 1920 and 1961, of which the Dimsie, Nancy (St Bride’s and Maudsley) and Springdale series are the best-known. Elsie Oxenham wrote over 90 novels between 1907 and 1959, of which the Abbey series (38 books in all) are by far the most famous. But Elinor Brent-Dyer outdid them all.
Girls’ school stories retained their popularity through and after the Second World War, thanks in part to the contributions of the prolific children’s writer Enid Blyton (1897-1968); her Naughtiest Girl (1940-4), St Clare’s (1941-5) and Malory Towers (1946-51) series are probably the most widely read school stories ever written. But no authors appeared after the 1940s who could rival Blyton’s popularity, and from that time on school stories began to borrow heavily from the mystery and crime genres also popular at the time — an influence which is apparent in the later work of Dorita Fairlie Bruce (for example, the books set during the Second World War) and Elinor Brent-Dyer (the Fardingales and Chudleigh Hold series).
By the mid-1960s, popular writers for girls had largely ceased to write in the school-story genre. Carpenter and Prichard state that “The 1950s saw the beginning of a general improvement in British children’s fiction, leading to a decline in the number of books written specifically for girls”5, and it is probable that the reduction in the number of girls’ school stories being published reflected this trend towards publishing books that would appeal to both sexes. The belief that publishing books for girls alone was undesirable persisted into the 1970s. Cadogan and Craig wrote in their introduction to You’re a Brick, Angela! A New Look at Girls’ Fiction 1839-1975 (1976):
At the present time girls’ fiction appears almost redundant as a genre: the most interesting work which is being produced is capable of appreciation by any
one. Classification along rigid sexually-determined lines is, or should be, no longer valid.6
Another reason for the decline of the girls’ school story was the frequently expressed preference of critics in the later 20th century for “realism” in children’s books. In the mid-1970s Robert Leeson, then literary editor of the Morning Star, having first dismissed the Chalet School series as “sentimentally escapist”, wrote with satisfaction that there was:
a slowly increasing number of stories featuring the ordinary day school in an industrial town as the well realised, unselfconscious background to drama and comedy. The modern school story must essentially come to grips with the life of working-class children and their home background.7
Yet other critics criticised girls’ school stories as realistic representations of a particular lifestyle — one that they deplored. As Gill Frith put it in “‘The Time of Your Life’: The Meaning of the School Story”: “Exclusive, expensive and enclosed, they represent a sealed, rigidly hierarchical world in which ‘normality’ is white and middle-class”.8 As politicians and educationists sought to ensure greater equality of opportunity in education in the 1960s, stories which portrayed private boarding-schools in a positive light were increasingly seen as undesirable.