The Chalet School Revisited

by Sheila Ray

  Clearly, the one thing all these writers have in common is that they have all produced series, often more than one. Other writers, often of great merit, or at least great prodigality of output, are read and enjoyed, collected by a select handful, but are not to be seen on every collector’s wants list, or going for vast prices in bookshops. The most interesting example of this must be Angela Brazil. Here is a writer who is regarded by most historians of children’s literature as being not only the first major writer of girls’ school stories, but (judging by the amount of space they devote to other writers) practically the only one. The children’s section of almost any second-hand bookshop will have several Brazil reprints (often marked — and priced — as firsts), even if it’s lacking the most basic stock of other girls’ school stories. And if one admits to reading and collecting school stories, the initial response will almost always be: “Oh, you mean Angela Brazil!” To the world at large, she is the archetypal girls’ school-story writer.

  Yet she is not collected. I don’t mean, of course, that no one buys her books — many, including myself, do. There are even some well-heeled people who look out for first editions. But of the 50-odd wants lists in my filing cabinet, only one actually lists any Brazils — and then only first editions in dust wrappers. And of those who buy her, how many people read and reread her avidly, as Brent-Dyer or Bruce, Oxenham or Forest?

  Is she, then, a poor writer? By no means. Her books, though often rather too whimsical and sentimental for modern tastes, are lively and amusing, with strong and sympathetic characters. She helped to establish a number of the more persistent school story clichés. But, foolish woman, she omitted to create a series. Almost all her books create a unique and disposable set of characters. Twice she provides a sequel to a book — Monitress Merle (1922) follows on from A Fortunate Term (1921) and the eponymous heroine of At School with Rachel (1928) is also at the centre of St Catherine’s College (1929); but those are the only real sequels.2 And thus the wants lists know her not.

  I am not, of course, suggesting that non-series girls’ school-story writers are not collected. Authors like Clare Mallory, Josephine Elder, Winifred Darch and Evelyn Smith have a devoted — and growing — following. But on analysis it will be found that those of us who collect these writers have almost invariably begun with one of the main series writers, and expanded to these lesser known practitioners. In other words, the Series Factor has given us a taste for school stories, and we feed where we can. After all, it’s hard to explain otherwise why this quartet of writers are not better known. Darch, Elder, Mallory and Smith wrote excellent and thoughtful school stories, which depict the world of school as it really is (all but Elder were teachers) and are greatly loved by many. Objectively, many of us would admit (if only between consenting collectors in private) that they are better writers than their more famous sisters. But although they are collected, they are not “collectable”. If one looks at only the financial aspect, one can buy most of their books without going out of single figures. And, given their quality, the most probable reason is their absent-mindedness in failing to produce some nice long series.

  At this point, I can hear my more knowledgeable readers muttering: “Wait a bit. Most of those authors did create series. Why isn’t this silly woman counting them as ‘series authors’?” So I’ll pause the argument here in order to define terms in proper scholarly fashion.

  A series, then, in this essay, will be defined as any group of books by the same writer which uses the same group of characters sequentially for at least three books. This is a fairly arbitrary definition, and is made more on impressionistic than analytical grounds. We have a term for a single book which follows a predecessor — we call it a sequel. After that, English would seem to lack words for each individual follow-up, save the generic word “series”. Furthermore, a group of school stories cannot qualify as a series simply by using the same school.

  Josephine Elder’s Erica Wins Through (1924) is set at the same school as her two Scholarship Girl books;3 but we meet the characters in Erica only as remote and magisterial seniors in the two later books, and all the interest is refocused on to Monica and her friends. The first book has so little character connection that the first time I read The Scholarship Girl I didn’t realise the schools and a handful of the characters were the same. Evelyn Smith uses the school she calls Myra Dakin’s in Val Forrest in the Fifth (1925) and then again in Milly in the Fifth (1928); but in the latter, Val and her friends are sixth-formers and we hardly see them. Again, the two books are not in the least inter-dependent. Clearly, then, the use of the same school in three or more books isn’t enough. We need to follow the same set of characters through — though if the series is long enough, the writer may gradually refocus the action on to a younger generation, while keeping the original protagonists as background.

  So much for the series. What about the “series writer”? Of the four writers we’ve been discussing, all but Darch did actually create trilogies: the Farm School books by Josephine Elder,4 Clare Mallory’s Merry series,5 and the Queen Anne’s books of Evelyn Smith.6 Are they then writers of series? I would argue that they aren’t. In part, this is because the bulk of their work is not series-based. But there is a more subtle distinction. For collectors of the series writer, there is almost always an initial inclination to collect only the series — and often, only the major (i.e. the longest) one. Oxenham collectors generally start with the Abbey sequence, and only expand when they realise that many of the non-Abbey books are linked with the Abbey books by recurring characters. Bruce collectors will often begin by saying that they “just want Dimsies” or “only collect Springdales”, before the virus spreads to adjacent collecting cells and they start demanding even Mistress Mariner, rarest and most expensive of Bruce’s books. No one I know has ever said that they “only want the Queen Anne’s books” or “just collect the Merry series”. After all, they’d soon run out.

  And, more importantly, one collects Abbey books or Dimsie books not pre-eminently because one enjoys the realism or the style of the writers (as is the case with Darch and these others), but because one has become so interested in the characters that one desperately needs to find out what happens next. When this happens, the books don’t even need to be school stories to attract school story readers (Antonia Forest, who has only written four school stories in her total Marlow output of ten contemporary and two historical novels, is perhaps the best example of this). And of the major writers of schoolgirl stories mentioned, Elinor Brent-Dyer is probably the supreme example of the writer who pulls her readers in almost entirely by the Series Factor.

  It is now to Brent-Dyer that we must turn; and first, we’d better list the series which she wrote. Within the definition I’ve given, the most famous is obviously the Chalet School serie, 59 books, including The Chalet School and Rosalie (1951); three annuals — the three Chalet Books for Girls (1947-9); and one odd little extra, The Chalet Girls’ Cook Book (1953). There is also a set of seven books, generically known as the La Rochelle series, which comprises Gerry Goes to School (1922) and A Head Girl’s Difficulties (1923), which introduce the Atherton family; The Maids of La Rochelle (1924); where we meet the orphaned sisters Elizabeth, Anne and Janie Temple, who encounter the Athertons; Seven Scamps (1927), which introduces the Willoughbys and links them with the Athertons and the Temples; Heather Leaves School (1929), which centres on Heather Raphael, an unpleasant newcomer to the series, reformed mostly by the efforts of Janie Temple; and Janie of La Rochelle (1932) and Janie Steps In (1953), which follow through a number of threads already established. These are by no means as cohesive as the Chalet books, dealing as they do with three or four separate families whose fortunes and eventual marriages are interlinked; in these books Brent-Dyer has used the technique perfected by Elsie Oxenham, where groups of characters established separately are then brought together. There is a third sequence of rather bad thrillers: Fardingales (1950) and The “Susannah” Adventure (1953) focus on the Ant
hony family and their Roseveare cousins; Chudleigh Hold (1954) on the Chudleigh family; The Condor Crags Adventure (1954) links Humphrey Anthony with the Chudleighs; and Top Secret (1955) is another purely Chudleigh adventure. And for the sake of completeness, I should also mention here three sets of two books which, by my definition are not strictly series but bear witness to Brent-Dyer’s love of continuations — Lorna at Wynyards (1947) and Stepsisters for Lorna (1948); A Thrilling Term at Janeways (1927) and Caroline the Second (1928); The School at Skelton Hall (1962) and Trouble at Skelton Hall (1963).

  But we can’t stop here with a simple list of series. Two of the series listed above — Fardingales and Chudleigh Hold — and three individual books — The School by the River (1930), Monica Turns Up Trumps (1936) and The Lost Staircase (1946) — link up to some extent with the Chalet series, and thus become a sort of extension of the latter. The major characters in both Monica and The Lost Staircase turn up to finish their education at the Chalet School.7 The School by the River introduces the Ecole des Musiciens in Mirania; Raphael Helston, morganatic grandson of the King of Mirania and created Duc di Mirolani in this novel, eventually marries the Belsornian Crown Princess Elisaveta8 — a direct connection with the Chalet series. The heroine of Chudleigh Hold also turns up at the Chalet School9 though Brent-Dyer has altered her surname from Chudleigh to Culver, and her Christian name from Arminel to Gillian (the Christian names of her family are left unchanged). Brent-Dyer’s love of links can be seen further in that Gay Lambert and Gill Culver recount a précis of this adventure to the new Chalet School girl Jacynth Hardy, commenting, “Mrs Maynard’s going to make it into a book some time, only changing the names, of course.”10 One presumes, therefore, that Joey Maynard did indeed write Chudleigh Hold, for some reason using the pen-name of Elinor Brent-Dyer . . . In precisely similar fashion, Jesanne Gellibrand relates the story of The Lost Staircase11 (of which she is the heroine) to Jo; and we know from Brent-Dyer’s manuscript notes that she did complete the story of Gay Lambert’s adventures in China (referred to in Gay From China at the Chalet School, 1944) though as far as we know the book was never published, and the manuscript is now lost.

  But by far the most highly wrought link is that between the La Rochelle books and the Chalet School series; so much so that it would be possible to fill the rest of this essay with an exposition of all the connections. Space here, alas, permits only a very brief mention of the most important. They began in a small way with Gerry (of Gerry Goes to School and A Head Girl’s Difficulties) visiting the Chalet School as Grizel’s guest12; but the real forging of the links begins when the school is forced to flee the Tyrol in The Chalet School in Exile (1940) and Joey and Madge end up on Guernsey. It just so happens that the three sisters whom we first met in The Maids of La Rochelle live in Guernsey; and Joey and Janie (now married to Julian Lucy and mother of a promising family) become intimate friends.

  What more natural than the presence of the second generation at the Chalet School when it restarts? And so we have Anne’s daughters Beth, Nancy, Barbara and Janice Chester, Elizabeth’s twins Nella and Vanna Ozanne, and Julie, Betsy, Vi and Katherine Lucy moving through the Chalet School, not infrequently as central characters. The second generation of Willoughbys (for the La Rochelle characters have intermarried with baffling frequency) present themselves in the pretty but feather-headed person of Blossom Willoughby and her sister Judy; these two are the offspring of Rosamund Atherton and Nigel Willoughby. We also meet Nita Eltringham, another Atherton-Willoughby sprog in that her mother is Cesca (Rosamund’s mother’s half-sister, but brought up as one of the Atherton children) and her father Mr Eltringham, the curate who acted as tutor to the Willoughby boys. Yet another offshoot of the clan is that Nan Blakeney to whose wedding (to David Willoughby!) the entire Chalet School is invited13; she is Rosamund’s cousin, who goes after her mother’s death to live with Janie Lucy.14

  I remember when I first read the Chalet series at the age of ten or eleven being very puzzled by all these characters whose relationships I was clearly expected to know, even though they were never spelt out in the Chalet books. Why was Nancy so upset at Julie’s peritonitis?15 Who was this “Janie” whom Jo visited in Armiford, who had managed to get her large family dressed and out in the garden at the appalling hour of 7 a.m.?16 And why was a certain Nigel Willoughby so willing to risk life and yacht to get Joey and her triplets over to England during wartime?17 There was no way of finding out. At ten, one does not generally frequent second-hand bookshops, and the only references I’d come across to the La Rochelle series were by Brent-Dyer herself in Chalet Club News Letters18 (I was, of course, a member). In answer to a query from a reader obviously as confused as myself, she had explained that these characters could all be found in the La Rochelle series, which had been out of print for a long time. So I gave up trying to understand — and only with adulthood, and the blessing of second-hand books, have I finally worked out the links.

  So, then, in Elinor Brent-Dyer we have one of the best examples of a writer who not only creates a long series, but connects other books, both individual and sequential, to that series. And having established this fact, we have to ask — Why? What are the benefits of a long series? There is one obvious answer. Readers enjoy series — a point which I hope has been thoroughly illustrated in the first part of this essay. But so far we haven’t tried to analyse this enjoyment any further. Nor have we asked what the benefits — and drawbacks — are for the writer. And since readers wouldn’t exist without writers, with the writer we shall begin. What is it that leads a writer — and Brent-Dyer in particular — to create a series which lasts for 59 books plus extras and is written over 45 years?

  Let’s first get one simplistic answer out of the way. Writers do not create series just because their publishers ask them to. Clearly that may be a factor; but authors are not machines, and cannot necessarily produce a series to order if their inclinations don’t already tend in that direction. If one takes three classic sets of children’s books and compares their publishing history, this becomes obvious. Richmal Crompton, who wanted to abandon William after five short episodes, was encouraged by the editor of Happy Mag. to produce more William stories, and wrote a long series with no difficulty at all.19 Tolkien, asked to produce a sequel to the mildly successful Hobbit, failed completely to produce another nice children’s book about Bilbo Baggins, thought, wrote and revised for 14 years and finally came up with Lord of the Rings.20 And C. S. Lewis, whose Narnia sequence might be considered a perfect example of publishers’ persuasion, had actually written four of the seven books before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published — because he wanted to finish the sequence he’d envisaged almost from the start.21 Writers, in other words, are as individual as the books they produce, and will not write series unless they are already minded to do so.

  What, then, makes a writer produce a series? I must confess that I’ve never actually produced one myself, so cannot analyse the desire from the inside, so to speak. But one can guess that it’s partly a desire to be (in Tolkien’s words)22 a “sub-creator” — the creator of an entire universe which has a certain amount of connection with the world as we know it, but which is to a greater or lesser extent sufficient unto itself. Obviously any book may be an act of sub-creation, but there is a fascination in extending the bounds of one’s empire — creating new characters, places, adventures, all inter-related and all clearly part of the same world. Psychologist and critic Nicholas Tucker, no fan of Brent-Dyer, described it as “the brick by brick assembling of a castle in the air.”23 The mind of the series writer takes pleasure in complexity, presenting characters who change (at least in age and status) and grow through experience. Any author knows the feeling of emptiness, almost of bereavement, on finishing the work in hand — if that author knows the imaginary world can be re-entered, it palliates the emptiness. There must be a great pleasure in creating new relationships between old characters, particularly when they are apparently far apart
and have little obvious connection with one another. Len Maynard, Jo’s eldest daughter, and Reg Entwhistle, the half-educated and resentful adolescent from Jo to the Rescue (1945) are unlikely seeming mates; but this must make the challenge all the greater. (“I know — I’ll have Len Maynard marry Reg Entwhistle . . . now, how can I get a boy whom we haven’t met since no. 19 in the series to marry Len in a few years’ time? I know, bring him out to the San as a doctor!”) Old characters can be reintroduced, a technique which is useful both for defining the imaginary world and (more pragmatically) for padding out an otherwise over-brief story — a technique which reaches its zenith (some would say its nadir) in The Chalet School Reunion (1963). The author of a long series need never lose sight of a beloved (or deliciously revolting) character, unless she is short-sighted enough to kill them off.

  So the first factor which leads to the creation of the series must be the mind and personality of the writer. And once one has established the series, there are enormous advantages. But the advantages vary according to the creative process which the writer uses. Some, such as Enid Blyton24 and C. S. Lewis25, create by (as it appears to them) seeing pictures or watching their characters interact. For this type of writer, series are useful because, once the characters and background are established in their minds, they are able to see their puppets taking on a life of their own and almost creating their own plots. It is possible that this was Brent-Dyer’s mode of working, but she seems to have belonged to the other school of writers — those who consciously devise events and relationships.

  This is a somewhat dangerous statement, as I have Brent-Dyer herself against me. In the first Chalet Club News Letter, she writes: “So far as I am concerned, the people are there, just out of sight, but otherwise alive and panting to tell their stories. I am merely the loudspeaker through whom they broadcast . . .” We are also, I think, justified in using the evidence of her fictional Jo. Jo’s character may bear little resemblance to the Elinor M. Brent-Dyer recreated by her biographer, Helen McClelland, but her writing parallels Brent-Dyer’s in so many ways that we are surely entitled to assume Jo’s methods are those of her creator. Indeed, McClelland quotes a friend of Brent-Dyer’s who claimed that “Joey was Elinor herself as she would have liked to be”.26 How then, does Brent-Dyer, in her Jo persona, claim that she writes? Joey tells Robin that she too is merely “a loudspeaker”27, creating characters who then take on a life of their own and broadcast their adventures to a waiting world without any conscious intervention of the writer — the Blyton technique, in fact.