The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  However, reading does have its dangers. Not every book is approved, although the first forbidden book to be mentioned is being read by a St Scholastika’s girl, Vera Smithers. Miss Browne finds what is described as a light novel which “had no business there or in the building at all” in Vera’s desk in The Rivals of the Chalet School (p.261); she tells Vera, “You know you are all forbidden to read any of this author’s works while you are still at school . . . we want you to retain your purity of mind for as long as possible” (p. 267). Possession of the forbidden book, combined with writing anonymous letters to the King of Belsornia and Crown Princess Elisaveta, leads to Vera’s expulsion. There is no indication of the author of this “light” novel, nor do we learn the nature of the book which Eustacia Benson borrows from the staff shelves in the library without permission in Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (p.85), an act which results in her being banned from the library until half-term.

  In a much later book, The Wrong Chalet School, the American novel Gone With the Wind is specifically named as “not exactly the type of book any schoolgirl is permitted to read in school — certainly not any schoolgirl of fourteen or fifteen” (p.162). Jennifer Penrose is in dire disgrace for smuggling it into school and passing it around her friends in the traditional brown-paper cover. To readers 30 years later, Miss Annersley’s reactions must seem a shade over the top; even in 1952, the year when The Wrong Chalet School was published, many teachers would probably have been pleased to find 14- and 15-year olds reading Margaret Mitchell’s classic. Certainly both my sister and I had read it by that age in the 1940s, and did so quite openly. According to a comment in a Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter, Gone With the Wind was changed to Forever Amber in the first paperback edition and later changed again, although the third title had been forgotten by the correspondent, Marilyn Gowland.42 Kathleen Windsor’s Forever Amber was regarded as much more sensational and would have been about right for a “banned” book in 1952, but perhaps Brent-Dyer would have been wiser to follow her earlier practice of not giving any details and leaving those to the imagination of the reader.

  By the 1970s the Chalet books themselves had achieved mentionable status in other children’s books. Eleven-year-old Jane Reid, the heroine of Catherine Sefton’s In a Blue Velvet Dress (1972), who always has her head in a book, takes a large suitcase full of them when she goes to stay with the Hildreths while her parents go to Scotland. When she opens her suitcase, she is horrified to find in it her father’s clothes and rock samples; Mr Reid, meanwhile, is “staring aghast at a suitcase full of Chalet School stories, Roald Dahl books, and lots of others”.43

  Conclusion

  As can be seen from the discussion and comment in the pages of the Friends of the Chalet School Newsletters and The Chaletian44, Brent-Dyer’s literary references offer a challenge to adult readers. Many of them, however, would have been recognised by her schoolgirl readers up to about 1950. When I was enjoying the books in the 1940s, I was not unduly concerned if I came across a reference to an author or title which I did not know; sometimes, later on, I found a book which she had mentioned, and then welcomed it as a long lost friend, although I don’t ever recall going out to look for one specifically.

  The references reflect Brent-Dyer’s own reading tastes and preferences. It seems unlikely that she was indirectly recommending books which she thought girls should read; if this had been her intention, she would surely have given more details, not just the author or title, as is often the case. In the Chalet Club News Letters, which began to appear in 1959, Brent-Dyer did suggest authors and titles to her readers; these lists also cover a wide range of books and sometimes the detail is not precise. For example, “study the books of Winston Churchill” in Chalet Club News Letter 5; as Churchill’s multi-volumed history of the Second World War was a best-seller throughout most of the 1950s, and there were always long waiting-lists in the library as each new volume was published (although I don’t recall it being read by teenage girls) these News Letter recommendations too, to some extent, probably reflect Elinor’s own reading both past and present.

  Kipling is missing from the lists of recommended authors and titles at which I looked in issues 5, 8, 12 and 15, but certain authors who are, rather surprisingly, not mentioned in the early Chalet books at least do appear; Jane Austen and the Brontës. Of the books to which Brent-Dyer refers in the first 17 Chalet titles, relatively few can be described as being specifically for girls and young women: the school stories, Little Women, the Elsie books and the works of Mrs George de Horne Vaizey and Charlotte Yonge. Although they did not write only for women, the great 19th-century women novelists are conspicuously absent. Mrs Gaskell is mentioned by name, as an example of a married woman novelist. The fact that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is never mentioned is particularly surprising as this book appeared in abridged editions for young people, as did George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and many of Brent-Dyer’s early readers would have been quite familiar with Jane’s adventures at school. Perhaps the omission of these authors is accidental, or perhaps Brent-Dyer felt that a proper appreciation of their novels depended upon girls having an emotional maturity, which she thought her own readers might not have acquired.

  By the late 1960s, when Brent-Dyer was writing her last books, British authors had not yet taken on board the need to challenge long-standing ideas about gender, race and class. There had already been some stirrings of unease about the undesirability of promoting Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, recommended for the “younger folk” in Chalet Club News Letter 15, but the organised movement which expressed concern about racism, sexism and the middle-class bias of children’s books was not launched until the early 1970s, when Rosemary Stones, one of the most influential campaigners, mounted an exhibition at the Exeter Children’s Literature Conference in 1974.

  As far as sexism is concerned, Brent-Dyer, in writing school stories for girls, was making some contribution to providing readers with positive role models; although the earliest Chalet girls, such as Gisela Marani and Bernhilda Mensch, are expected to live at home until they marry, by the time of the books written in the 1940s, college and careers are common expectations for most of the girls.

  With respect to class, Brent-Dyer’s books are firmly middle-class. Although she appears to have been ahead of her time in condemning extreme snobbery, she still reflects the generally held, pre-war, middle-class views about state schools; for example, in Three Go to the Chalet School (1949), Gran tells Mary-Lou, “there isn’t a decent school near enough for you to go to” (p.12). Brent-Dyer’s attitude is slightly more relaxed in The Chalet School and the Island (1950), when Jo tells Jack that Stephen can “go to the village school for a year or two, which won’t hurt him’ (p.22), although Jack says, warningly, that he may “pick up all sort of language” (p.23).

  Apart from her apparent endorsement of the Ku-Klux-Klan, there is no overt racism in Brent-Dyer’s books; unlike many of her contemporaries, she doesn’t use words such as “nigger”, which came to be regarded as totally unacceptable. Her attitudes towards Jews and her portrayal of the Kashmiri girl, Lilamani, who appears in Lavender Laughs in the Chalet School, suggest that she would have readily accepted the new attitudes about the role of people from minority groups in books for the young.

  However, Brent-Dyer’s books must be examined in the context of the period at which they were written; tinkering with details, as has apparently been done in some of the later paperback editions, cannot change underlying attitudes. Above all, it must be recognised that Elinor Brent-Dyer has provided hours of enjoyment for several generations of girls. Her literary references enrich her early Chalet books in a way for which she has never been given full credit.

  NOTES

  1. Ann Parker, “Materials selection in Hertfordshire: a policy in action”. In Vivien Griffiths ed. Buying Books (Library Association Youth, Libraries Group, 1983), p.15.

  2. Constance Stern, Library Association Record 38/
6 (1936), p.245.

  3. Gillian Freeman, “Angela Brazil”. In Tracy Chevalier ed. Twentieth Century Children’s Writers (St James Press, 3rd edition, 1989), pp.124-5.

  4. T. Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 (Clarendon Press, 1992), Chap. 5.

  5. G. A. Carter, “Some childish likes and dislikes”. Library Association Record 49/9 (1947), pp.217-221.

  6. The School Library Review 1 (1936-1938), pp.218-220. The School Library Review and the School Librarian were the journals of the School Libraries Section of the Library Association and the School Library Association respectively. In the 1940s the two organisations merged as the School Library Association and the journal continued as the School Librarian, in which form it is still published today.

  7. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 1958). First published 1932.

  8. Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales (Edmund Ward, revised edition, (1965). First published, as a book for young people, 1946.

  9. Geoffrey Trease, Tales Out of School (Heinemann, 2nd edition, 1964). First published 1949.

  10. Marcus Crouch, Treasure Seekers and Borrowers (Library Association, 1962), p.41. Crouch presumably had in mind not only Walpole’s Jeremy at Crale (1927), but books such as Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co (1899) and Horace Annesley Vachell’s The Hill (1905); I feel the influence is minimal.

  11. Frank Eyre, British Children’s Books in the Twentieth Century (Longman, revised and enlarged edition, 1971), pp.82-5. First published as 20th Century Children’s Books, 1952.

  12. Dorothy Neal White, About Books for Children (Oxford University Press, 1946).

  13. Lillian H. Smith, The Unreluctant Years (American Library Association, 1953).

  14. Evidence is provided by the existence of societies and magazines for Brent-Dyer enthusiasts in Australia and elsewhere, some of which (such as the Australian Friends of the Chalet School) pre-dated similar British organisations.

  15. John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children (Penguin, 3rd edition, 1987), p.265. First published 1965.

  16. Ibid., p.265.

  17. Margery Fisher, Intent Upon Reading (Brockhampton, 1961), p.179-180.

  18. Margery Fisher, Who’s Who in Children’s Books (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), p.159.

  19. Margery Fisher, “Review”. Growing Point 24/2 (1985), p.4461-2.

  20. For use of this phrase, taken from W. B. Yeats’ poem, “He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven”, I am indebted to Peter Hunt, who used it in his title for a paper on Arthur Ransome delivered to the Arthur Ransome Society in November 1991.

  21. Mary Cadogan and Patricia Craig, You’re a Brick, Angela! (Gollancz, 1986). For example, see p.154, pp.201-4. First published 1976.

  22. Reprinted in Arthur Marshall, Girls Will Be Girls (Hamish Hamilton, 1974), p.139. It is not clear exactly where this review originally appeared, but probably in the New Statesman.

  23. Isabel Quigly, The Heirs of Tom Brown (Chatto and Windus, 1982), p.220. The title comes from Thomas Hughes’s pioneering boys’ school story, Tom Brown’s School-days (1857).

  24. Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (Manchester University Press, 1988), Acknowledgements, page not numbered.

  25. Helen McClelland, Behind the Chalet School (New Horizon, 1981).

  26. Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives (Basil Blackwell, 1989).

  27. Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).

  28. Rosemary Auchmuty, A World of Girls (Women’s Press, 1992).

  29. The incidents and quotations in and from the Chalet books are identified in the text. References are taken from the hardcover Chambers editions.

  30. These are The Two Form Captains (1921), The Captain of the Fifth (1922), The Troubles of Tazy (1926) and Patience and her Problems (1927), all published by Chambers.

  31. For example, Mary K. Harris, Gretel of St Bride’s (1941) and Josephine Elder, Strangers at the Farm School (1940).

  32. For more background to the social, economic and educational factors which shaped Brent-Dyer and her early readers, see Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800 — 1900 (University of Chicago Press, 1957) and Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 (Clarendon Press, 1992).

  33. Gillian Freeman, The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil (Allen Lane, 1976), p.20.

  34. In December 1993, a newspaper report about a girl’s suicide began, “A girl who chose to go to boarding school after reading stories about midnight dormitory feasts killed herself because she feared she would be expelled for smoking. Alice Clover, 13, who loved reading Enid Blyton’s tales of adventure at Malory Towers hanged herself in the showers at Cawston College, Norfolk, an inquest was told.” The Times, 16 Dec. 1993, p.8.

  35. Miss Jessie Fothergill, The First Violin (Guildford, 1877). See “UK Corner”, Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 20 (May 1993), p.13 (actually unnumbered), and the follow-up comment by Cynthia Castellan, Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 21 (Aug. 1993), p.12.

  36. Looking for a copy of the text in connection with this essay, I found one in Short Stories from Modern French Authors, edited by a group of professors under the direction of Jules Bue (Librairie Hachette, 1928). My daughter-in-law found a slightly adapted version in another French reader of the same period in her school, while my husband recalled reading the story in an English translation in the 1920s, probably in one of the “gift books” published to raise funds during the First World War. All this suggests that it was widely available in the early part of the 20th century and would be familiar to Brent-Dyer’s readers. The story originally appeared in Alphonse Daudet, Contes du Lundi (1873).

  37. Andrew Rutherford, “General Preface”, Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 1993), p.vii.

  38. M. Sarah Smedman, “Martha Finley”. In Glenn E. Estes ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 42: American Writers for Children before 1900 (Gale, 1985), p.182.

  39. Mrs Jarley first appears in Chapter 26 of The Old Curiosity Shop, from which this quotation is taken. In the following chapters Little Nell (a happy coincidence of forename?) is shown how to talk about the waxworks to customers.

  40. For a detailed discussion of the parallels, see Stella Waring, “The Peri’s Cave”, The Chaletian 5 (1993), pp.19-21. In the Macmillan edition of The Three Brides which I used, the account of the Peri’s Cave appears on pp.135-8.

  41. Mrs George de Horne Vaizey’s novel Pixie O’Shaughnessy was first published in book form in 1903. I used the serial version which appeared in the Girl’s Own Paper Vol. 3, Nos. 1136 (1901) to 1165 (1902). The sheets and pillowcase party takes place in Chap.s 18-20.

  42. See Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 21 (1993), p.3

  43. Catherine Sefton, In a Blue Velvet Dress (Faber & Faber, 1972; Walker Books, 1991), p.10.

  44. The Chaletian (1990-1994); the Friends of the Chalet School Newsletter 1989-.

  IV. “SCHOOL WITH BELLS ON!” THE SCHOOL AT THE CHALET AND BEYOND

  JU GOSLING

  AS every fan will know, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was inspired to write the first book in the Chalet School series, The School at the Chalet (1925), after spending the summer of 1924 in the Tyrolean village of Pertisau beside the Achensee. Having begun her career as a teacher at the age of 18 in 19121, by this time she must have accepted the possibility that, rather than marry, she would spend the rest of her life working in education.

  It is clear from the detailed descriptions of the Tyrol, which was the school’s setting up to the Second World War, that the area had made a striking impression on her during her visit. It is equally clear that she felt a great deal of emotional involvement with both the scenery and the Tyrolean people, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that in an ideal world Elino
r Brent-Dyer would have liked to have spent the rest of her life in Pertisau. But she had to work to support herself and, even if an “English school” had been founded there along the same lines as the Chalet School, her responsiblity to her mother — with whom she lived for most of her life — would probably have prevented her from taking up a position.

  But while Brent-Dyer was unable to move to the Tyrol and teach in reality, there was nothing to prevent her from doing so in her imagination. Given the detailed descriptions of the area in The School at the Chalet, it is reasonable to assume that she conceived the idea for the book while still on holiday, and took the opportunity to research locations and to begin to develop characters and plots. Her first two books had been school stories — Gerry Goes to School (1922) and A Head Girl’s Difficulties (1923) — and the third, The Maids of La Rochelle (1924), made good use of local colour (in this case, Guernsey). Her fourth book was to combine both elements.

  Although we know from Helen McClelland that Brent-Dyer later came to identify strongly with Joey2, at the time she created The School at the Chalet she may well have had a greater empathy for Madge, the young teacher who, unlike her creator, was able to follow her dream and set up her school on the shores of the Achensee. There are many grounds for supposing that, in Madge, the 30-year-old Elinor created the character and life which she wished for herself.

  While Elinor and Madge both had to earn their own living, Madge was six years younger and extremely good-looking, and therefore faced a future in which marriage was much more likely. While Elinor had grown up in a modest terraced house in the northern industrial town of South Shields, without a garden or inside sanitation3, Madge came from a higher social class, and her Cornish home was in a more gentrified part of the country. And while Elinor was forced to hide the fact that her father had abandoned her family when she was still a toddler, Madge’s parentage was above question or scandal.