School stories
Jan. 2nd, 2010 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI've been reading pre-1950s school stories for years (predominantly British or Commonwealth) and find them soothing, in similar ways to detective stories and other strongly formulaic genres; some transcend the form, some exemplify it, some have occasional good bits and some fail completely (there's also the entertainingly bad form). I do find them interesting as social history as well, in terms of what's expected and what isn't, although attitudes and expectations can sometimes be a bit difficult to calmly accept (class particularly in these ones, although gender sometimes gets a little bit of consideration).
Margaret Biggs, Melling series. Melling is a small private school in Cambridgeshire; the Blakes are a new family in the district, unusual (for the time – 1950s) in that both parents have jobs, although admittedly as at home writers – father detective stories, mother dense historical nonfiction. All the children are bright, personable and friendly, useful when the girls start at Melling and run into the Laceys, gentility fallen upon economic hard times, who used to own the estate the Blakes have just moved into and are irked at the displacement. This tension is resolved fairly rapidly, but the contrasts between characters (the Laceys are quieter, less outwardly emotional and more private) drives a lot of the subsequent storylines. “Head Girl” has the common school story trope (one I’m fond of) of having the head girl/prefect position go to a quiet unassuming type over their brash confident (and convinced of their own superior merits) friend.
The last one of these was published recently – there’s another from 2008 and an earlier one from the 1950s, neither of which I’ve read. They’re enjoyable – not good, in the same way as Antonia Forest’s books are, but perfectly competent school stories with more emphasis on home life and extra-curricular friendships than average, and – like quite a few writers of the time – good nature writing. Changes is wobbly from a time point-of-view and suffers rather from the desire to match up any single adult characters still hanging around, but has a strong environmental plot line with conservation work in the fens that I could actually have done with more of.
Angela Brazil has become shorthand for many of the clichés and stereotypes of the English girls’ boarding school story, which is a bit unfair – some of her books are, indeed, riddled with cliché, but others are quite good. These two are relatively strong – in the first, Gwen gets promoted into the fifth form and deals with resentment plus a manipulative pupil (this is actually quite nicely done – they accidentally break a tea-set belonging to the headmistress, and the cover-up/attempts to pay for it are all believable scale dramas), with a background of her impoverished father getting a job promotion so they can stay in a picturesque village and not end up in a nasty industrial city (author’s bias evident). The second is a sequel (to A Fortunate Term, apparently, which doesn’t appear to be on Project Gutenberg), and has a mix of school (with monitoresses) and home, along with a surprising degree of cross-dressing by a supportive male cast member (twice – once for a play, once for a joke that goes wrong and results in the Mistaken Suspicion of the heroine). I have also flagged a bit where the characters discuss the importance of keeping on with your career if you have a talent, rather than just giving up after you get married.
Dorothea Moore, Tenth at Trinders. Last of large family attends school and attempts to defy expectations. Not helped by my copy having randomly missing pages (I bought it from one of those second-hand shops with lots of tiny disorganised rooms, and the general impression was that the books were decorative rather than practical), but a potentially good topic for farce that the author didn’t quite bring off (attempts at mischief misinterpreted by circumstances as heroic rescues etc), largely because of a failure to set up believable characters.
Helen Barber, A Chalet School Headmistress. See earlier comments on Chalet Girls Grow Up – this falls on the competent fill-in side of the spectrum. I like the indoor fireworks party where they improvise with curtains containing holes covered with cellophane and torches waved behind them.
Elinor M Brent-Dyer, Janie Steps In. Part of the La Rochelle series, in which large families perform the same settling down of nervy isolated individuals as done by the whole school in the Chalet books. I can never keep track of who marries whom in this (or the Chalet) series, but this was less overwhelming in that regard than I’d feared. A lot of breezy assumptions about how everyone (who matters) should think or behave.
Margaret Biggs, Melling series. Melling is a small private school in Cambridgeshire; the Blakes are a new family in the district, unusual (for the time – 1950s) in that both parents have jobs, although admittedly as at home writers – father detective stories, mother dense historical nonfiction. All the children are bright, personable and friendly, useful when the girls start at Melling and run into the Laceys, gentility fallen upon economic hard times, who used to own the estate the Blakes have just moved into and are irked at the displacement. This tension is resolved fairly rapidly, but the contrasts between characters (the Laceys are quieter, less outwardly emotional and more private) drives a lot of the subsequent storylines. “Head Girl” has the common school story trope (one I’m fond of) of having the head girl/prefect position go to a quiet unassuming type over their brash confident (and convinced of their own superior merits) friend.
The last one of these was published recently – there’s another from 2008 and an earlier one from the 1950s, neither of which I’ve read. They’re enjoyable – not good, in the same way as Antonia Forest’s books are, but perfectly competent school stories with more emphasis on home life and extra-curricular friendships than average, and – like quite a few writers of the time – good nature writing. Changes is wobbly from a time point-of-view and suffers rather from the desire to match up any single adult characters still hanging around, but has a strong environmental plot line with conservation work in the fens that I could actually have done with more of.
Angela Brazil has become shorthand for many of the clichés and stereotypes of the English girls’ boarding school story, which is a bit unfair – some of her books are, indeed, riddled with cliché, but others are quite good. These two are relatively strong – in the first, Gwen gets promoted into the fifth form and deals with resentment plus a manipulative pupil (this is actually quite nicely done – they accidentally break a tea-set belonging to the headmistress, and the cover-up/attempts to pay for it are all believable scale dramas), with a background of her impoverished father getting a job promotion so they can stay in a picturesque village and not end up in a nasty industrial city (author’s bias evident). The second is a sequel (to A Fortunate Term, apparently, which doesn’t appear to be on Project Gutenberg), and has a mix of school (with monitoresses) and home, along with a surprising degree of cross-dressing by a supportive male cast member (twice – once for a play, once for a joke that goes wrong and results in the Mistaken Suspicion of the heroine). I have also flagged a bit where the characters discuss the importance of keeping on with your career if you have a talent, rather than just giving up after you get married.
Dorothea Moore, Tenth at Trinders. Last of large family attends school and attempts to defy expectations. Not helped by my copy having randomly missing pages (I bought it from one of those second-hand shops with lots of tiny disorganised rooms, and the general impression was that the books were decorative rather than practical), but a potentially good topic for farce that the author didn’t quite bring off (attempts at mischief misinterpreted by circumstances as heroic rescues etc), largely because of a failure to set up believable characters.
Helen Barber, A Chalet School Headmistress. See earlier comments on Chalet Girls Grow Up – this falls on the competent fill-in side of the spectrum. I like the indoor fireworks party where they improvise with curtains containing holes covered with cellophane and torches waved behind them.
Elinor M Brent-Dyer, Janie Steps In. Part of the La Rochelle series, in which large families perform the same settling down of nervy isolated individuals as done by the whole school in the Chalet books. I can never keep track of who marries whom in this (or the Chalet) series, but this was less overwhelming in that regard than I’d feared. A lot of breezy assumptions about how everyone (who matters) should think or behave.
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Date: 2010-01-03 03:20 am (UTC)