by Sheila Ray
The facts, though, do not match this claim. It’s useful in this context to analyse Jo’s first attempts to write a complete novel28, as we are here given a very full picture of the process of creation. Jo, working on her first book, Malvina Wins Through (destined to meet a fiery fate) begins by listing some of the pranks which she and her chums played when middles; she then invents the Heroine, the Best Friend and the Bad Girl, whose motive for living is being nasty to the Heroine. Next she devises a series of discrete plot events, in each of which the Bad Girl tries to get the Heroine into trouble, but which don’t seem otherwise to be causally linked. When this book is condemned by Matron (“Matey”) as being “rubbish”, Jo throws it in the furnace and begins a new story, Cecily Holds the Fort.
It’s interesting that both this book and its abortive predecessor have titles which Jo chooses in advance, Brent-Dyer commenting that “It would not tie her down too much” — a clear indication that Jo’s plots are worked out as she goes. Cecily is not dissimilar to Malvina, in that Jo begins with a character — Cecily; gives the latter an enemy (more convincingly this time in the person of a science mistress whom Cecily dislikes); and then creates a variety of incidents around these characters (p.71):
With recollections of a certain fatal “experiment” of Evadne’s, Jo provided a similar sensation for St Michael’s High School, when Cecily nearly wrecked the laboratory in consequence of carelessness. Further memories helped her to add a few more pranks to her heroine’s record. At the same time, the book contained nothing that might not have happened at the best regulated of schools, though it must be admitted that most schools do not have quite such a spate of happenings all at once.
We can see Brent-Dyer working in exactly this way in her early books. If we look at her very first published novel, Gerry Goes to School, she creates her central character, Geraldine Challoner — a 12-year-old musical genius brought up by elderly great-aunts — and brings her into the large and lively Trevennor family, where she evokes the hostility of 14-year-old Jill. Part of the plot develops from Jill’s enmity, but far more consists of unrelated incidents — a horse out of control, a fags’ strike at St Peter’s (a girls’ school despite its name) — or simply of conversation between contemporaries, whether prefects, juniors or adults. The plot, in fact, could be described as rambling or realistic, depending on how organised you like your plots to be. And throughout her writing career, Brent-Dyer tended to follow this pattern.
Even when one of her books has a strong central theme, such as The Lost Staircase, much of the narrative is not related directly to that theme. Those of us who enjoy Brent-Dyer regard this as a potential strength, in that it reflects the disconnected nature of everyday life; but even so, we must admit that her non-admirers have a point when they accuse her of being unable to follow a plot through properly, and having an unstructured mind. Either way, it is undeniable that Brent-Dyer’s strength does not lie in creating an organically connected plot.
What has all this to do with her use of the series? I would argue that the great advantage of this lengthy series is that the “plot” is ultimately the existence of the Chalet School itself, and its civilising influence on everyone (apart from Thekla von Stift and Betty Wynne-Davies) who goes there. Thus it doesn’t really matter whether an individual book has a strong central character from whom all incidents arise (Eustacia, Genius) or is discursive and slightly disconnected (Exploits, Changes); everything that happens is automatically part of the central underlying theme. The Chalet School is the whole which is greater than the sum of its parts (which sounds a little like Joey’s idea of maths). This releases Brent-Dyer to do what she most enjoys: making up stories as she goes; reproducing conversations which must, to the outsider, be at best puzzling and at worst utterly tedious; and providing us with incidents which could in theory, and sometimes in practice, be inserted into almost any book.
For instance, a brief mention in A Head Girl’s Difficulties of some wild scamps at St Peter’s who powder “the basins in the senior splasheries with some fizzy stuff” is reused at much greater length in The School at the Chalet (1925), where Bette and Bernhilda are convinced that witchcraft is causing the foaming basins. But, most of all, Brent-Dyer is creating for us an entire world where people can rub each other’s corners off. That is the theme of Gerry Goes to School; and 45 years later, in Prefects of the Chalet School (1970), it remains a vital ingredient.
I doubt very much, however, whether any of this was consciously a motivation for creating so many Chalet books. There are other factors in creating a series of this type which she would have been quite aware of, and which she clearly enjoyed. Returning (if you will pardon the pun) to Jo Returns to the Chalet School, it may be recalled that Jo, much to her chagrin, has to rewrite an entire chapter of Cecily Holds the Fort because she has muddled up two of the prefects. She then concludes that the only way to avoid this problem is to create lists of the relevant characters, and becomes so absorbed in this exercise that “she finally made out the roll for the whole school, staff as well as girls. Then she put ticks by the side of all those who had appeared in the story so far.” (p. 71).
This was certainly taken straight from Brent-Dyer’s own experience. Helen McClelland has very kindly sent me copies of some of Brent-Dyer’s working notes, including lists of the girls who comprised each form at the Chalet School, and she seems to have done this quite regularly. Certainly this is a sensible precaution against muddle (although it doesn’t seem to have prevented her from other quite notorious confusions), but one cannot resist the idea that she enjoyed making lists and inventing names; enjoyed, in other words, all the paraphernalia of her imaginary school as much as actually telling the stories. Helen McClelland calls one of the chapters in Behind the Chalet School “Living in Chalet Lands”; and clearly Brent-Dyer revelled in her imaginary universe.
There are further advantages in the series for its creator. Once you’ve established the background, you don’t continually have to stop to work out, say, the name of a form teacher, the games played by the school, the colour of the hatbands or the number and organisation of the houses. Since you and your readers already know all this, and are aware, too, of the personalities of many of the chief actors, you can concentrate on events which arise from those personalities — always the most fascinating — without having to spend chapters setting them up.
A good example of this can be seen in Grizel Cochrane. In The School at the Chalet, which isn’t yet a series, we are shown how Grizel, cowed by her stepmother’s mental cruelty, finds it hard to come to terms with the comparative freedom and atmosphere of approval of the newly formed Chalet School. Grizel gradually tests the limits of authority by a graded sequence of disobedience, culminating in an dangerous illegal expedition to the Tiernjoch; but Brent-Dyer delays this climax until Grizel has been up against authority enough times to demonstrate to the reader just what sort of person she is. By the time we reach the fourth of the series, The Head Girl of the Chalet School (1928), Brent-Dyer can make Grizel run off, equally illegally, to see the Falls of Rhine at the very beginning of the book and the reader simply nods. Yes, that’s what Grizel is like. We know her now.
Obviously in the earlier books of any series the writer cannot take too much for granted, and Brent-Dyer gives us sometimes quite lengthy passages introducing the school and the major characters to novice readers. But eventually the series takes on such a momentum that the author can, if she so wishes, launch straight into the next book secure in the confidence that any new reader will either carry out her own research, hunting out the books which relate the previous history, or give up — and by this time there are so many readers that one less makes little difference. Perhaps I could give a personal example here. The first book I read was The Chalet School Wins the Trick (1961) — no. 46 in the series — which begins (p.9):
Rosalie Dene always vowed that it was she who had begun it, though she had certainly never intended it.
Rosalie was one of t
he oldest of the Old Girls of the Chalet School, a fact of which she was privately very proud. She had also been school secretary since she was twenty.
As a result, there wasn’t much about the school that she didn’t know, to quote her old chum and schoolfellow, Joey Maynard.
Already there were mysteries. Why would a girls’ school story begin its narrative with a grown-up like the school secretary? Who was this Joey Maynard? But so buoyant was the writer’s self-confidence that I was carried along with the flow of the story, only resolving at the back of my mind to find out more about this girl and the school she belonged to. Paradoxically, the lack of background information is a positive advantage: just as a newcomer to a real school (or other institution) must make her way in this new world, aware that there are so many people, places and customs she has to discover, so the novice Chaletian is aware that there is an entire universe to be investigated, much of which is below the surface. The series, once established, carries its own authenticity within it.
And this brings us to the attraction of the series to the reader, rather than the writer. After all, a writer may create a series long enough to fill the entire British Library stack, but if no one reads it, it will stay there. What is so attractive about the series in general, and Brent-Dyer in particular?
Let’s take the negative element first. It must be admitted that the series reader does not have to work so hard as the reader of a one-off novel. If one is lucky enough to get in at the beginning, so to speak, and start with The School at the Chalet, progressing through in the right order and taking in the various connecting books on the way, the whole thing is amazingly straightforward. But even for the majority who start in the middle and dart around as the books turn up, it’s only the first plunge which is difficult. Once acclimatised, one can become involved with any new book immediately. In this sense, we series addicts are rather lazy. We know Jo and Madge, Mary-Lou and Verity; we recognise the Dripping Rock; and we could probably find our way quite easily from the Gornetz Platz down to Interlaken. There’s no effort involved. It’s what one might call the Warm Bath Effect — one simply sinks back into the bubbles and relaxes.
But of course, no reader would give laziness as a reason for loving these books. Far more potent is the relationship which we have with the characters. And here it must be admitted that a poor author is far more likely to get away with fuzzy or unrealistic characterisation in a series than in a single book. Familiarity may breed contempt, but it also breeds affection; and a character who might simply annoy or bore in one book, becomes part of the familiar and welcome landscape in a series. Rosemary Auchmuty comments: “As with real friends we tolerate all sorts of flaws and deviations for the sake of our shared past; we are invariably pleased to meet them again, to catch up on old times and find out what they’re up to now.”30
While I would not describe Brent-Dyer as a poor writer, she cannot be counted among the great ones of English Literature; she did not possess the skill to create many characters who would automatically linger in our memories after one meeting. But met in book after book, they don’t merely linger, they take over. We care intensely what happens to them. This applies even to some of the minor characters. Who, reading The Chalet School in Exile (1940), can fail to identify with Maria Marani’s numb terror for her father, taken to Buchenwald and then not heard from? But we care because we’ve known Maria since the very first book, and have met “Onkel Florian” many times. And the major characters are so well established that Brent-Dyer can take them far away from the Chalet School as such — can spend, indeed, entire books removing them from England to Switzerland or having holidays in Yorkshire or the Tyrol, confident that we will be just as interested in their out-of-school activities as ever we were in their school adventures. As Helen McClelland says:
Elinor’s principal achievement would seem to lie in having created at the beginning of her series a set of characters who gradually assumed an almost independent existence in her eyes and those of her readers. Then, by employing various devices, she was able to keep at least the most important of these characters on stage throughout the series. Later their multitudinous children were to follow in their footsteps at the school, often learning from the same teachers as had their parents. And what amounts to a personal relationship between reader and characters was slowly to be established.31
So important is this aspect of the Series Factor that it can carry the author through creative troughs which would destroy the non-series writer. I think that most lovers of the Chalet books would agree that, viewed overall, Brent-Dyer is at her strongest in the early books when the school is in Tyrol and the first fine careless (literally at times) rapture is still in full flow. Equally, most would agree that the books do not attract quite so much, taken individually, when the Chalet School moves out to the Oberland; and that the last dozen books are really quite poor. Sometimes, indeed, there are parts which are embarrassingly bad. One thinks, for instance, of the scene where Len finally accepts her destiny (p.67)32:
Reg pulled her to him and Len sank down beside the bed. His arms went round her, then he held her from him and looked at her searchingly.
“I take it we’re engaged. Like it, darling?”
Len chuckled. “So much I can’t think why I didn’t know it before. It all seems absolutely natural and very nice! Yes, of course we’re engaged, only it must be kept dark until term ends.”
Nor is it merely individual scenes which fail to convince. From the early sixties onwards, many books are almost empty of any original incident or character, and rely on repetitions of earlier events with change of character and slight alterations in circumstance. The plot of The Feud at the Chalet School (1962) is that of Rivals of the Chalet School (1929), with the addition of proximity; The Chalet School Wins the Trick (1961) a re-working of The New Chalet School (1938), using a very similar set of enemy children. If the capacity to irritate of Val, Solange and their friends is less that that of the “Mystic M”, that must point to the lower imaginative charge Brent-Dyer was able to put into the later book.
And by the time we have reached the last few books, the plots, such as they are, are mostly repetitions of the theme which was established way back in 1920 in Gerry Goes to School, and used many times since: new girl comes to school, finds another girl hostile (often because the new girl has become friendly with someone whose attention is coveted by her rival) and is finally reconciled with her enemy. In the earlier books, the theme is used sparingly: we can see it working in Lavender Laughs at the Chalet School (1943), for instance; and Barbara Chester confronts the same problem in The Chalet School and Barbara (1954).
As the series passes the two-thirds point, Brent-Dyer reverts to this plot more frequently: Margot resents Ted33 as Francie resents Ruey34 — and here the books are only three apart. And by the end, the heroines may be distinct, but the stories aren’t. Jane, Flavia, Adrienne, Erica, Althea . . . all have to confront hostility and find eventual reconciliation. Brent-Dyer has succumbed to a formula.
Yet it cannot be denied that readers of the Chalet series search just as avidly for the last few books as for the Tyrol sequence — more avidly, indeed, as the later books (none of which were reprinted in hardback) are far rarer and more expensive to buy second-hand. Nor do these books, once acquired, sit on the shelf unread while their proud owner reads the first few over and over again. By existing as part of a series, they take on the positive attributes of the earlier books which they themselves lack, and are enjoyed as part of the sequence. For the reader as well as the writer, the Chalet School itself is the main plot. And since the Chalet School is central to Althea and the Chalet School (1965) or Challenge for the Chalet School (1967) just as much as The Chalet School and Jo (1931) or The New Chalet School (1938), readers are still faithful.
But we must now confront an apparent contradiction in the argument so far. I have suggested that the Chalet School is the major character in the series; but also, that the main reason we would give for enjo
ying the books is the relationship we have with the characters. How can both ideas be true? The seeming paradox can be resolved by looking more closely at what is meant by “the Chalet School”. If one thinks of it simply as an institution which exists independently of the people who teach and learn there, one has missed the whole point. Just as, in Christian circles, “the Church” means not the building in which people meet on a Sunday, but the entire body of believers, living and dead; so, in the Chalet series, “the Chalet School” means “the entire corpus of Chalet girls and staff” plus, indeed, a whole host of related individuals (Jack and Jem are disqualified by age and sex from ever attending the School as pupils, and will probably never teach there, but who would dare exclude them?).
This metaphysical concept of the School becomes clearer when one remembers its geographical and numerical vicissitudes. For 13 books it’s in the Tyrol, growing from 3 pupils to about 300; the rise of Nazism seems to kill it, but it is reborn in Guernsey (with only 52 pupils) for half a book.35 Fleeing again from the invading Nazis, it ends up in a village near Armiford36 (Brent-Dyer’s fictional version of Hereford) for 7 books, where it grows again; expelled by drains, it moves to an island off the Welsh coast37, where it stays for seven books (making an preliminary excursion to the Oberland to establish a finishing branch38). It ends up on the Gornetz Platz39 for the final 28 volumes, rising to “about four hundred [girls] . . . with the Kindergarten”40, as well as “the English branch”, about which we hear more or less nothing, though occasional girls come out from there to Switzerland. Clearly this school, which has occupied a minimum of 7 different buildings, cannot be regarded as a single physical entity.
