The Changing Face of the Abbey Girls
Posted 12 December 2008 in Books by Catriona
And I mean that quite literally.
I have a small number of the Abbey School series: fourteen, in fact, picked up randomly from various sales.
(Fourteen is not many, when you look at the entire list of Abbey School books. And if that list looks impressive, make sure you also look at the so-called Abbey Connectors, or books that share some characters and, occasionally, plots with the Abbey books, but are otherwise distinct. I do wonder, sometimes, how these prolific writers of girls’ school stories—Angela Brazil and Josephine M. Brent-Dyer are the other two who spring to mind—ever found the time to sleep.)
Of course, the Abbey School series are girls’ school stories in only the loosest sense of the word: few of them take place even partly in school. But I’m not concerned with that here.
Nor am I concerned with the connection with early Cistercian monastic life, though my sister-in-law—whose disciplinary focus is the Cistercians—assures me that the titular abbey is a real Cistercian abbey.
Nor am I concerned with Oxenham’s—and her characters’—obsessive involvement in the English folk-dancing revival.
No: I’m being shallow.
I’m only interested here in how the covers change across my issues, from the early Seagull Library reprints (Seagull Library was an imprint of Collins Publishers) to the later Children’s Press editions.
Take Secrets of the Abbey, for example—one of the middle books (in terms of publication date) or one of the later books (in terms of preferred reading order), originally published in 1939. This cover is from a 1951 imprint:
All perfectly ordinary: a little odd and misty, perhaps, but a perfectly ordinary cover.
Strangers At The Abbey, on the other hand—this one is both very late in the preferred reading order and late in terms of publication date: in fact, this 1956 reprint is close to the original 1951 publication:
Now that’s just odd, although it is nice to see the abbey itself actually making an appearance. But what’s with the girl on the left? I can’t figure out if she’s an albino or a dandelion clock. Still, it’s nice to see the illustrator working to overcome the deficit in severely Anglo-Saxon protagonists in 1950s’ children’s books.
1952’s Selma At The Abbey (which comes directly after Strangers in both publication and preferred reading order) reverts to a less frightening cover, in this 1959 reprint:
Although they are looking rather two-dimensional, compared to the 1951 cover of Secrets.
And speaking of two dimensional, there’s the 1961 reprint of 1923’s The New Abbey Girls, one of the earliest of the series in both preferred reading order and publication date:
Seriously, nothing in this environment is three-dimensional, including the abbey and the daffodils. I also want to know how the woman on the left managed to get her hair to look like that.
Still, putting two-dimensional characters on the cover at least warns the reader of the general approach to all except the protagonists . . .
Come the 1966 reprint of 1924’s Abbey Girls Again (which comes immediately after The New Abbey Girls in publication date and preferred reading order), characters are looking better rounded.
Plus, it’s nice to see an homage to the school-story spirit. Nothing says school story like a midnight feast.
But, finally, the gem of my collection: this 1968 reprint of the early Abbey Girls At Home:
Oh, the eyelashes! And the back-combing! And the aggressively flicked hair! And the orange! And the lamp!
(Just quietly, I rather like the lamp.)
This book, I might add, was originally published in 1929. I severely doubt that this was what Oxenham pictured when she thought of her protagonists.
Share your thoughts [5]
1
Wendy wrote at Dec 12, 10:15 am
Checking the wikipedia list I think i once read Schoolgirl Jen at the Abbey. although I have no memory of what it is about, the title is very familiar. Also the Jandy Mac character mentioned on the page rings a bell.
you’re right that is a nice lamp…and also a nice grand piano.
2
Leigh wrote at Dec 12, 10:17 am
That last book doesn’t look like school girls at all, in fact if you photoshopped in a cigarette and a martini they look like bond girls
3
Catriona wrote at Dec 12, 10:31 am
Wendy, the plot is basically the same in almost all of them: the three main girls—Jen, Joan, and Joy: Joy owns the ruined abbey, her cousin Joan the big manor house nearby, and Jen is their rather younger friend—meet someone who is having rather a difficult time of it, and change the latter’s life through the revelation of the mystical influence of the abbey ruins, an education in the habits and work practices of early Cistercian monks, and an inclusion in the burgeoning English folk-dance revival.
Characters come and go, and the later books deal with the second generation, but the general outline is the same.
I, for example, have read Schoolgirl Jen At The Abbey—Leigh, that was one of the books I took from your mother’s collection: it is inscribed to her from her aunt, uncle, and cousin for Christmas 1955—but I have no memory of the plot.
And, Leigh—you’re exactly right: that’s what they look like! Bond girls!
4
Matthew Smith wrote at Dec 12, 11:34 am
I’ll take the 1968 cover with a dry martini on the rocks. And the lamp. The hair is pretty bad up until the 1961 cover after which the girls appear to be more grown-up.
5
Catriona wrote at Dec 12, 11:50 am
Well, it does depend on which characters are being depicted: I’d say—without checking—that the 1968 cover shows Joy and Joan, who are adults at the beginning of the series (albeit quite young adults: they’d be maybe in their mid-20s by this point in the series).
And, as I say, the books were labelled “school stories,” especially in reprints, but after the first one (1914’s Girls of the Hamlet Club) there’s really very little of the school story in them.
On the other hand, if this is Joan and Joy, they’d be much younger here than they are in 1939’s Secrets of the Abbey, and at least one of them’s on the cover of that (I think, from memory, that’s Jandy Mac in the foreground and Joan on the right, with the clearly much younger Jen on the left).
Partly, I suspect, it has to do with how much older fashions started making quite young girls look by the late ’50s-early ’60s: that rapid jump from childish clothes to, essentially, adult clothes, before a kind of burgeoning market in “teen” outfits.