by Sheila Ray
There is a large cast of characters, but 50 years after reading the earlier titles I find it easy to recall even some of the minor characters and their distinguishing features. However, I was fortunate in that the first Chalet book I read (in about 1940) was The New House at the Chalet School; I then caught up on all the earlier titles, and read the later ones up to and including Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School (1943), while I was a schoolgirl. I read them many times, partly because there was a shortage of books during the Second World War, so the characters and incidents of these early titles are engraved on my memory. It is possible that girls coming first to one of the much later titles might be confused by the many characters and lose interest quite quickly. However, I have recently come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why the Chalet books were, and have remained, so popular with succeeding generations of schoolgirls is that it is comparatively easy to find out what other titles exist and in which order they should be read, since the complete list of them is usually included in each book.
In style, the Chalet books are very much part of popular literature. There is no fine writing, phrases are repeated, much of the story is told in dialogue and there is little in the way of demanding vocabulary, even allowing for the use of foreign words and phrases. Nevertheless, Brent-Dyer had a gift for description. Most readers of the early books set in the North Tyrol must feel that the Tiernsee really exists, and cannot be surprised when they discover that it is in reality the Achensee, and that the lake steamer and the rack-and-pinion railway are there for the viewing. As a schoolgirl in the 1940s, I pored over an atlas trying to identify the Tiernsee, without success. I learnt of its existence in the early 1950s while on a train between Bolzano and Munich and finally went there in the early 1960s. I found not only the reality but that the light fell on Briesau (Pertisau) in exactly the way I had always imagined from Brent-Dyer’s descriptions.
It is, however, the themes and the way in which they are treated that offer the most scope for constructive discussion of the Chalet books. Elinor Brent-Dyer drew heavily on the contemporary conventions of the girls’ school story. She even appears to have copied ideas from her contemporaries, in particular from Elsie J. Oxenham and Dorothea Moore. The concept of a music school in her Ruritanian, non-Chalet story, The School by the River (1930), seems to be modelled on Dorothea Moore’s Guide Gilly (1922). Even more obviously, the idea of an English school linked to a sanatorium in healthy mountain air had already been used by Elsie J. Oxenham in The Two Form Captains (1921), some years before Jo of the Chalet School was published in 1926. In The Princess of the Chalet School she uses the conventions of the typical Ruritanian school story: the Ruritanian princess sent to an English school incognito from which she is kidnapped by men plotting against the crown. The set-piece in which the brave English girl, who has rescued the princess, rides through the Ruritanian capital is a popular one, and Brent-Dyer makes the most of it.
However, although she describes activities portrayed in the typical school story, such as folk-dancing, Guides, drama and games, Brent-Dyer builds on these and treats many of them in a new and enriching way. She describes small events and makes them interesting, as can be seen in The Chalet Girls in Camp (1932), where there is no need to introduce spies or criminals to keep the action going; she relies on a succession of quite plausible happenings to make an enjoyable story.
Most notable are Brent-Dyer’s internationalism and her emphasis on the importance of international understanding; she does not display the British chauvinism so typical of many of her contemporaries. There is never any suggestion that British girls are more honest or more brave than girls of other nationalities. Non-British teachers are not mocked or teased; the first Deputy Head, later to become Head, of the Chalet School is a French woman, and the various French Mademoiselles are never the figures of fun that they are in most girls’ school stories. The Chalet girls do not make fun of accents or misunderstandings of languages. A rare example of this is Grizel’s mix-up of heiliges and heisses in The School at the Chalet (1925), when she, Madge and Jo have just arrived in Austria and Madge take the two girls to a hairdresser’s shop in Innsbruck; even then Jo realises that she is being unfair in drawing attention to the mistake later. Elinor Brent-Dyer’s attitudes are very different from Elsie J. Oxenham’s attitudes in her stories about St John’s and St Mary’s Schools in Switzerland (1921-7)30 and from Angela Brazil’s in The School in the South (1922). In these, there seems to be little attempt to show pupils being encouraged to take advantage of opportunities to learn the local language, to study the local culture or even to meet any nationals.
Elinor Brent-Dyer’s internationalism culminates in the formation of the Chalet School Peace League in The Chalet School in Exile (1940) and its continuance through the subsequent books set during the Second World War. The Chalet School in Exile was a very informative book for many British schoolgirls reading it in the early years of the war, just after its publication in 1940. At the time, although there were some school stories which included refugee schoolgirls who had escaped from Nazi Germany to England,31 Brent-Dyer’s book was unique in the way in which it described what was happening in German-occupied countries. The treatment meted out to Jews was brought to life for me when, at the age of 11 or 12, I read about Jo and Robin trying to protect Herr Goldmann, the jeweller. Sitting in a Gasthaus in Spartz, enjoying coffee and cakes, they see him being chased by a crowd of youths throwing stones and rotten fruit, and rush out, Robin to put her arms around Herr Goldmann and Jo to harangue the pursuers (pp.119-20).
In her portrayal of the staff and girls, and their relationships, Brent-Dyer is both moderate and generous. New girls are treated well and they continue to be accepted; there is no petty bullying or quarrelling. If there is a difference of opinion, it is soon sorted out. The behaviour of the Chalet girls, when they cause the St Scholastika girls, whom they regard as rivals, to go home with wet feet after the two schools meet on a narrow path, is quickly condemned. There is little of the snobbishness which was the much criticised hallmark of many girls school stories, and the domestic staff are real people. One of the events of The Head Girl of the Chalet School (1927) is the wedding of Madge’s maid Marie; this is described in far more detail than any of the weddings of the main characters, most of which take place off stage.
There are good relationships between girls of different ages; despite the heavy sighs on the part of the prefects about the behaviour of the middles, or of a particular form or of individual trouble-makers, the older girls are practical and caring and take a healthy interest in the concerns of the younger girls. This may have happened at first because of the smallness of the school, so that girls of all ages are thrown together, but it continues. For example, in The Exploits of the Chalet Girls (1933) there is a major expedition, packed with incident, to the Barenbad Alps, designed to show just how awkward and unaccommodating the new girl, Thekla, really is. Marie does her best with her young and unpleasant cousin, making conversation to the best of her ability; she is supported by her peers, including Frieda Mensch and Sophie Hamel, to whom Thekla is positively insulting. Frieda later has to take the younger Cornelia, shaky after falling into a hole, back to school. As they grow tired, the younger girls are given an “older guardian” to look after them. Throughout the sixth and seventh chapters which describe this outing, the older girls face up to the task of looking after the younger ones, trying to make sure they have a good time and don’t come to grief. This tradition of caring continues through the series. In Tom Tackles the Chalet School (1955), when a match against Monkton Priory has to be cancelled because of bad weather, the older girls rally round to arrange alternative attractions, including an impromptu gym tournament, and find suitable prizes from amongst their belongings (p.59).
Concern for the less fortunate is frequently shown, in caring about what is happening to the local people and in raising money for good causes through the Christmas play or the annual sale of work. Brent-Dyer cannot be faulted
in providing role models for girls which might encourage them to grow into caring, well-adjusted and responsible members of the community.
How does she fare when looked at from a feminist point of view? One of the great advantages of the girls’ school story is that it provides a microcosm in which females are seen in positive roles and girl readers are shown that they too can achieve academically, socially, politically and so on. Brent-Dyer does not make a great song and dance about the alternatives (as they were then) of taking up a career or getting married. She very much reflects the climate of opinion at the time when she was writing, and which continued to be the general view until well into the 1960s. She does not offer much choice in the matter of careers, but here again she is reflecting reality. Those girls who do not have a special gift which will lead to a career in, say, music or, in Jo’s case, writing, become teachers, doctors (at least not always nurses) or school secretaries, and marriage is seen as the normal goal for most of them. Of the early central characters, Marie becomes engaged while she is still at school; Jo, in the tradition of many popular heroines, has always despised the idea of marriage so it takes her somewhat by surprise, but at a fairly early age; Frieda goes into it in the natural course of events, but Simone, like Juliet and various other Old Girls, goes to university and embarks on a teaching career because she must earn a living, although she too eventually marries.
Literary references in the Chalet School books
In the 1920s and 1930s writers for girls were generally middle-class women who had read widely even if they lacked formal educational qualifications. They were beneficiaries of the changes which had taken place in society in the latter part of the 19th century. Urbanisation had brought about the growth of schools, libraries, concert halls and art galleries. The Education Act of 1870 had merely officially confirmed progress towards universal literacy. Although many families lived in poverty, the changes affected not only the growing middle classes but many working-class families. Philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie were replacing the landed entry in providing opportunities for poorer people; Sunday schools and Settlements run by the universities and religious bodies supplemented the work of weekday schools in poorer areas. Even those children who left school early learnt to read and write and continued to use these skills. Both my grandmothers, born in the late 1870s, had left school by the age of 12, but were great readers to the end of their lives.
Magazines provided accessible reading material at a reasonable price. Dickens’s novels were published in weekly penny parts in the 1840s and as time went on 19th-century classics were published in cheap editions. They were also abridged to make them accessible to young people and excerpts, perhaps simply retold, appeared in school readers along with stories from history and about life in other countries. In this way a wide range of children acquired a working knowledge of the plot and characters of many literary classics as well as a knowledge of history and geography through learning to read. In an age when there was no radio or television, and when the cinema was in its infancy, reading was one of the few forms of escapist activity. My mother, born in 1901 and not particularly academic, used to tell how, at the age of 14 or 15, during the First World War, she was reading Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), crouched in front of a dying fire, when a policeman knocked on the door because a light was showing. Most young teenagers faced with Reade’s book, a minor classic, today would regard it as an impossible challenge.32
What Gillian Freeman says of Angela Brazil — “widening the horizons of her readers in so many spheres, literary, geographical, historical, archeological and botanical, as well as creating awareness of music and the visual arts”33 — is also true of Elinor Brent-Dyer. Historical and geographical information, languages, music and literature are all topics which are introduced naturally into her books. From the early Chalet books the reader must also absorb a great deal of background information about Austria, its history, geography, social conditions, customs and folklore.
To give some idea of the richness which is imparted to the Chalet books by these elements, I am going to consider in some detail the literary references which can be found in the first 17 books of the series; these are the titles which I read as a schoolgirl, and which I can therefore relate to my own experience. In fact, after the 17th book, Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, Brent-Dyer seems to have made less reference to literary works, and relied much more on invented titles, including the books supposed to have been written by Jo, such as Gipsy Jocelyn which is one of the prizes in the gym tournament in Tom Tackles the Chalet School (p.60). (In the same book, however, there is a nice piece of publicity for Chambers Dictionary, which is of course published by the publishers of the Chalet books in hardback — pp.193-5). One can only speculate about the reasons for this change. Did Brent-Dyer realise that her knowledge of what most girls read was out of date? Did her publishers persuade her to drop specific references to make her books more readable for girls differently educated? Having invented so many books by Jo, and the Lavender Laughs series, and with so many past events to which reference could be made, were the literary references just crowded out?
Reading is an important activity for the girls of the Chalet School and literature lessons are always an important part of the curriculum. After she marries and goes to live at the Sonnalpe, Madge frequently comes down to the school to give her special lessons in English literature, at least during the time-span covered by The Head Girl of the Chalet School (p.16). Later in the same book the girls “rejoiced loudly” at the news that she had come on a few days’ visit, and requested a Shakespeare lesson (p.115).
Jo is an omnivorous reader. I have always assumed that she was named for L. M. Alcott’s Josephine March in Little Women; did Brent-Dyer plan right from the start to make her a writer too? Jo’s gift for writing is established in the second book of the series, Jo of the Chalet School, when she wins a prize in a writing competition. It is significant that, in The Princess of the Chalet School, another nail is hammered into the new matron’s coffin when Madge discovers that Matron has stopped the girls reading in bed on Sunday mornings; this has always been allowed on condition that they sit up, have a good light and wear bed-jackets.
The nature of the books and stories to which reference is made ranges widely. In Jo of the Chalet School, Jo begins her literary career with a simple folk tale about a poor forester, which was published in the first issue of The Chaletian, and then secretly submitted for a competition by Jem. Brent-Dyer, like many of her contemporaries, was well acquainted with the traditional tales of Europe, and references to them are scattered through the books. The girls are described as imitating Kay and Gerda in Hans Andersen’s The Snow Queen (first English translation, 1846) by warming pennies and using them to make small round holes in the frost on the window panes (Jo of the Chalet School, p.136). This is an experience unknown to most late 20th-century schoolgirls living in centrally heated homes, no doubt, but a practice familiar to me when I read the book in the early 1940s. Traditional tales also provide points of reference; in The Head Girl of the Chalet School (p.69), Bernhilda is likened to “one of the princesses in Grimms’ Tales” (first English translation, 1823-6), while in Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (1930, p.113), Jo compares a house out of which she always expects an old witch to appear to the one in Hansel and Gretel (another tale of the brothers’ Grimm).
Elinor Brent-Dyer also demonstrates an interest in local folk tales. On the expedition to the Zillerthal in The New House at the Chalet School, Frieda tells a Tyrolean legend about the building of a church (pp.236-7). Elsewhere in the same book there are references to Biddy O’Ryan’s Irish folk tales (pp.189 & 198), and in the later The Highland Twins at the Chalet School (1942), Fiona McDonald’s tales of Highland kelpies, seal women and black hares are mentioned (p.152).
There are also references to well-known children’s classics. In The Head Girl of the Chalet School, George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind is being read t
o the youngest girls (p.116) and in The Rivals of the Chalet School, Mary Burnett, the Head Girl, goes off to read Peter Pan to the Robin (p.272). In The Princess of the Chalet School Jo is reading Little Women (p.264) and in The Chalet Girls in Camp, when Jack Maynard tells her that she’ll have to grow up some day, Jo replies, “Not a day before I have to! I’ll be like Jo March in Little Women, and ‘wear my hair in two tails until I’m twenty’!” (p.165). In The Chalet School Goes to It (1941), Gwensi explains how salmon are poached to Daisy and Beth: “They have flares and hold them low under the water, you know, and the salmon come to the light — it’s all in The Water Babies.” (p.181). Fiona and Flora, safely installed as The Highland Twins at the Chalet School, are “provided with story-books from the Junior library, and Fiona revelled in The Secret Garden . . . while Flora was lost in Five Children and It” (p.84).
Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), Louisa Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871) are likely to have been known to Elinor as a child as they have seldom, if ever, been out of print. She would have been ten when J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan was first performed in 1904; although it did not appear as a book with a text by Barrie himself until 1911, there were several “books of the play” before that and, as Barrie was a leading literary figure of the day, Peter Pan quickly took its place amongst children’s classics. E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It (1902) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) are also by writers who were well-known literary figures in the first decade of the 20th century. By 1942, when The Highland Twins at the Chalet School was published, both books had been reprinted many times, were regarded as children’s classics and were likely to be known to most girls reading Brent-Dyer’s books.
