Belated Conclusion To The Weirdness Of Girls' School Stories
Posted 16 April 2009 in Books by Catriona
While my parents were visiting, we popped out to a bookshop I rarely have a chance to visit, and I found a lovely little pile of Angela Brazil and Josephine M. Brent-Dyer school stories.
Including one that has the worst cover I have ever seen:
Shudder.
The mustard yellow! The hideously magnified laughing schoolgirls! The—actually, what is that font? Some sort of pseudo-Swiss 1970s’ thing?
And why is there what appears to be a waxwork model of one of the pilgrims who headed to the New World seeking a country in which they could worship in their own way and stop other people from worshipping in theirs? And why is she holding a rain gauge?
And is that Beethoven in the background?
I’m not even going into what’s happening over on the right-hand side of the cover, there.
I do think I’m going to have nightmares, though.
Share your thoughts [13]
1
Nick Caldwell wrote at Apr 16, 07:42 am
The font, incidentally, is Gothic Tuscan Condensed Medium and is strikingly horrid. Perfect for a heavy metal album logo though.
2
Wendy wrote at Apr 16, 07:45 am
thanks me too…who is that old crone?
I used to love these books so much though :)
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Catriona wrote at Apr 16, 07:52 am
I don’t know who the old crone is! Or the waxwork. I’m pretty sure about Beethoven . . .
If I’ve read this one at all (and it’s possible I haven’t, since there were roughly seventy in the series), it was years ago. I’ve not read this copy yet: I must do that. Then I’ll report on the crone.
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Nayantara wrote at Apr 16, 08:50 am
Oh goodness, this brings back memories. I loved the Chalet School when I was younger though it’s been years since I’ve read one. I believe this cover depicts an evening’s entertainment at the school…something called Mrs Jarley’s Waxworks (the crone) if my hazy memory is correct. The staff dressed up as various figures from history, Mrs J went around and ‘brought them to life’ and the students were supposed to guess who they were. I’m sure there was more to it than that otherwise I imagine it would have been a slow evening’s entertainment! Sorry, my books are all packed away otherwise I would check the details for you.
Enjoying the Girls School Stories posts, btw.
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Catriona wrote at Apr 16, 09:21 am
That sounds like the Chalet School all right, Nayantara. It never ceases to amaze me how little actually went on in most of the middling to late books from that series—when they were in Wales during and immediately after the war, there weren’t even the usual every-second-book avalanche to lighten things.
(I wonder which member of staff got to dress as Beethoven? I suppose that’s Florence Nightingale in the middle then—the lady of the lamp.)
It’s sometimes surprising to me what we used to enjoy in children’s fiction—some of it was so banal, for want of a better word—so much of what happens in girls’ school stories is banal—but there was (and still is) something fascinating about that evocation of daily life when it’s both familiar and exotic.
At least, that’s the only way in which I can explain the proliferation of stories in which the most exciting event is a midnight feast.
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Wendy wrote at Apr 16, 09:24 pm
Oh the midnight feasts!!They were always fascinating although I couldn’t understand why anyone wanted to eat anything at midnight. I think for me just the whole idea of boarding school was exotic and foreign, seeing as I used to walk five minutes up the road to a state primary school every day, wearing thongs for shoes. Lacrosse, Matrons, French teachers and avalanches were pretty darn exciting.
Nayantara…from your description I think I may have actually read that one!
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Catriona wrote at Apr 16, 09:44 pm
I think that’s it, Wendy: it’s something we can relate to and understand, but an intensely exotic version of it.
(And I did end up going to a semi-boarding school, though I never boarded. When I was in year eight—I think it was year eight—they made it compulsory for year sevens to spend a week in the dorms, to try and break the sharp division between boarders and day-goes, and I was so thankful to miss out on that!)
Girls’ school stories are such an upper-middle-class genre, too. There are hardly any aristocrats in the books: the only exception I can think of is the Honourable Angela Faverleigh from Blyton’s St Clare series, and she’s clearly quite minor aristocracy. And any working-class students tend to be marginalised. It’s all the daughters of doctors and bankers and lawyers.
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Nayantara wrote at Apr 17, 01:11 am
I think the CS managed a Princess!
I always thought the idea of the midnight feast was terribly exciting and longed to go to boarding school when I was little ‘un. Thank goodness my parents never agreed to it…
Oddly enough, at the CS, midnight feasts were considered a big no no amongst the students. There were a couple of half-hearted attempts at them, usually undertaken by the girls who were thought to be bad seeds anyway.
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Catriona wrote at Apr 17, 01:23 am
Oh, good point, Nayantara. I’d forgotten the beleaguered princess from a totally fictional Middle European country in the early Chalet School books.
She was barred from the succession under Salic law when she attended the Chalet School, wasn’t she? And then her father or the Parliament overturned agnatic succession when her cousin tried to kidnap her, making her heiress? Something like that, I seem to recall.
So she really was a schoolgirl-fantasy princess at that point: one with no real governmental responsibilities.
Katherine Oldmeadow had some books with the word “princess” in the title: I have Princess Prunella and Princess Charming. But I don’t think their protagonists are literal princesses.
Are midnight feasts given as much prominence in other stories as they are in Enid Blyton? Blyton’s students are always having midnight feasts, but they don’t seem to be as prominent in, say, Angela Brazil stories.
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Nayantara wrote at Apr 17, 02:15 am
That’s right, Catriona. And then I think the monarchy was removed completely when the communists took over. I believe Elisaveta (the princess) ended up migrating to Australia…though this last is a bit hazy…
Midnight feasts might well have been a Blyton feature – I can’t recall them occurring too much in any of the other school stories I’ve read…
Blyton has a lot to answer for on the food side of things for me. I grew up in India and Singapore and yearned for chocolate buns and ginger beer – it all seemed so exotic!
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Catriona wrote at Apr 17, 03:53 am
I haven’t made it to the point where the communists take over! Wow.
That’s the problem with these long-running series: I don’t have all of them and I’m only picking them up when I see them secondhand, so I read three or four in a sequence, then I skip forward ten books and find that little Robin is suddenly a nun in Toronto and Madge is now Lady Russell, and it’s all terribly confusing.
The same with Abbey School series, actually.
They do eat a lot in Enid Blyton books, don’t they? All those boiled eggs and tinned sardines and leftover birthday cakes and boiled sweets.
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Celia wrote at Apr 18, 05:05 am
Oooh, I have that one in my little collection of Chalet School books – it is a particularly revolting cover. Although I never seem to find these books in bookstores, I generally buy them from Ebay. I prefer these covers though to the updated ones where all the girls look like they’ve stepped out of the 80s – kind of this one – http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n34/n172625.jpg
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Catriona wrote at Apr 18, 12:54 pm
Oh, that is a particularly bad example of an updated cover there, Celia! But I agree: the 1970s’ covers are bad, but they’re also somehow appealing to me. I suspect it’s because they’re the covers I grew up with.
I have some horrible late 1990s/early 2000s editions of Enid Blyton stories, where they’ve updated the covers (though kept the original internal line drawings): the girls all have Eton crops and crumpled socks and their shirt-tails pulled out. The mistresses would never have stood for that at Malory Towers! (In fact, I seem to remember plots revolving around that with first Gwendoline and then Zerelda, the American girl.)
And welcome to the blog! I do love it when new commenters pop up!