Chapter 10 When it isn’t cricket: books, reading and libraries in the girls’ school story

The girls’ school story has been claimed to account for some forty per cent of girls’ reading and publishing in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s.¹ It remained the most popular type of fiction for eleven to fourteen-year-old girls for whom boarding school was an exotic unreality in the 1940s.² Angela Brazil, Elinor Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elsie J. Oxenham, the ‘big four’, were joined by myriad other writers.³ A late twentieth- and twenty-first-century interest both in children’s literature and in popular fiction has led to academic interest in the girls’ school story, under the lens of social class, the latent feminism of an empowering all-female environment in which women govern their own lives, and sexological interpretations of that same environment which can include close female friendships.⁴ Scholarly interest in the reading of fiction, extending sometimes to intradiegetic reading, has barely extended to girls’ school stories.⁵ This chapter seeks to fill the lacuna, with particular focus on Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series.

Intertextually, the genre itself seldom promotes reading. Like some actual boarding schools, the school story seldom celebrates cerebral activity. Girls, if not mistresses – and stories tend to be related from the girls’ perspective – regard lessons as being of secondary importance to sports. Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s The Senior Prefect (1921), in which the girls resent a new headmistress’s decision to curtail the time spent on games, summarises trenchantly fictional girls’ typical values:

‘Of course, we know she’s very clever and all that,’ began Meg, reviving again. ‘She’s an M.A., and – and other things – ’

‘M.A.!’ the head girl’s tone was even more scornful than before, as she slipped off the desk on which she had been sitting and prepared to leave the room. ‘M.A., indeed! She’s a hockey-blue of Cambridge, and she played for England two years ago!’⁶

General reticence concerning reading has an even more deep-rooted reason in the underlying values of the school story and of its structure. The school is a community, whose values are communal. A recurrent overarching theme concerns ‘forming, storming and norming’⁷ as a new element introduced at the beginning of the book either adapts to that community or, more seldom, leaves it: usually an individual new girl or a small group of new girls; sometimes a new mistress, generally a headmistress with particular ideas and the power to execute them; a new house; or even an entire additional school. The emphasis is on relationships, whether feuds or friendships, and is social.⁸ Societal values are courage and resourcefulness, helping the weak and above all a sense of honour, understood as being truthful in word and deed and in never sneaking.⁹ The explicit importance of games is to foster team spirit, with praise for girls who know not to poach their partners’ tennis balls and when to pass a hockey ball. What matters is putting the society – team or school – before self. Girl Guides or similar institutions (Guildry, Camp Fire) are likewise common as character-building, communal activities.

In such a world, reading has little place. It does not lend itself plot-wise to the exhibition of bravery or honour. Moreover, reading in the modern period is primarily an individual activity and as such is at odds with community values, acceptable as it may be outside the school environment. External reading which can be made to serve the school community is welcomed: for example, when girls are acting a play based on a book and want to know the plot.¹⁰ Biblical readings at morning prayers for the assembled school are a communal activity which is taken for granted. Reading on the whole, being individual, is either marginalised or is portrayed negatively. Explanation is required to render it acceptable: for example, Petronella in Irene Mossop’s Well Played, Juliana! (1928) is permitted to be a bookworm because severe illness prevents her from playing games.¹¹ Notwithstanding, Mossop portrays Petronella as oversensitive, jealous and sarcastic, scarcely an ideal role model. Gwendoline Courtney’s Rosalind in At School with the Stanhopes (1951) puts her reading of Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son to a social use when the girls stage an eighteenth-century evening, but although clever and a natural reader, she resents the circumstances which threw her upon the works of Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Boswell, Smollett, Sheridan and Goldsmith: the older brother with whom she was sent to live after her aunt died is a scholar who neglects her, and: ‘ “there’s nothing else I can do when I’m at home,” Rosalind said, the interest in her tone changing to bitterness.’¹²

Even worse, reading is imposed as a salutary punishment. Barbara in The New Head – and Barbara spends two hours in detention reading.¹³ In a late, superior example of the genre, Nicola Marlow, an excellent all-rounder who enjoys reading during the holidays, is discovered to have smuggled an unfinished library book of questionable content back to school with her, and is set to read a list of classics before embarking again upon a book of her own choice.¹⁴ The message is mixed. Barbara has previously read and enjoys the book set, yet she would rather be outside. Nicola relishes some of the books on her list and must force herself through others.

Whereas in the above examples negativity lies in the circumstances of reading, sometimes the reading matter is what is objectionable. In such instances it combines with other elements to indicate unacceptable character. Hazel Simmons reads one stereotypical magazine story after another about a lord who marries a secretary, and her superficial reading is of a piece with general flouting of rules, bullying, forgery, and bad behaviour.¹⁵ Worse again is forbidden, salacious literature: novels which remain unnamed, to prevent actual readers of school stories from pursuing them. Smuggling such books into school and reading them is one of several signs of moral depravity, and possession of such reading matter is liable to be the proof which seals girls’ expulsion. One of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s headmistresses sums up the general thought, which applies to girls within school stories and beyond them: ‘We want you girls to retain your purity of mind as long as possible. Do you think that you can soil your minds with the thoughts and deeds recorded in such a story and yet retain that purity? It is impossible, for you are not little children now.’¹⁶

Particularly obvious and common, whether incidental or a strong plot element, is the intradiegetic reading of school stories.¹⁷ In an atypically mature treatment of the scenario, underlying the falseness of the story within the story, twenty-three-year-old Nicola is a successful authoress whose publishers have asked her to write a school story. Having been educated privately and hence having no knowledge of schools, she turns to school stories to learn about the environment, only to become increasingly bewildered: ‘I got heaps of school stories out of the library and soaked myself in them, but I wasn’t satisfied. Most of them seemed to me frightfully unnatural. I liked some of them, but I got so mixed I couldn’t make up my mind which kind was nearest to the real thing.’¹⁸ She masquerades as a late teenager to spend a term as a schoolgirl and gain experience to inform her writing. At one point in the story girls criticise the standard school story as unrealistic – ‘real schools aren’t a bit like those in books’ – and suggest ideas for a more credible plot.¹⁹ Nicola provides an additional narratorial level which the standard school story lacks, able to point out the artificiality of the schoolgirl world: for example, the intense keenness on sports and the complete indifference to young men.²⁰

Whereas Nicola is open-minded, usually the context is of new girls who have conceived false expectations of schools from their reading and must adjust their views. The distinction is especially strong when the preconceptions are based on penny or tuppeny weeklies, a cheaper and hence ‘lower’ form of literature than the hardbound novel, as in Winifred Darch’s Heather at the High School (1924) and Elinor Brent-Dyer’s A Problem for the Chalet School (1956).²¹ Heather’s integration takes place over a prolonged period as she realises the senselessness of the schoolgirl periodical on which at first she based both her expectations and her behaviour. In Brent-Dyer’s novel, Rosamond Lilley, of a working-class family, fears snobbery on the basis of the cheap schoolgirl papers she has read and must be disabused in word and deed.²² Reading is divorced from reality, so is unhelpful and misleading. In all such situations, the writer validates her supposedly mimetic story by distinguishing strongly between it and the false intertextual one.

Against this non-portrayal or negative portrayal of reading within girls’ school stories, Elinor Brent-Dyer’s books are remarkable for promoting reading.²³ The remainder of this chapter focuses on books and reading in her Chalet School series. Brent-Dyer’s series stands out among girls’ school stories for several reasons, most prominent of which are length and enduring popularity. It comprises fifty-nine books published between 1925 and 1970 (the year after Brent-Dyer’s death), which continued to flourish after the genre in general had died; values remain static throughout the series. The entire series was republished in paperback abridgements in the 1990s and continues to be reissued unabridged. Whereas other authors set single books on the Continent, only Brent-Dyer placed most of a series there. In some ways the Chalet School appears distinctive because the sheer quantity of books underlines elements which are inevitably less marked when present in single books, such as the depiction of staff in their quarters without the girls. Brent-Dyer, carving out her place in a crowded genre, consciously sought to stand out: for example, by giving her protagonist Jo triplets, who, with their siblings, call their parents ‘Mamma’ and ‘Papa’; and by the convention of pupils curtseying to the headmistress, to the astonishment of new English girls – features emphasised repeatedly in the books. The values of the Chalet School differ from those of a standard boarding school. Pupils underline merely the school’s exceptionally caring nature and its emphasis on health.²⁴ But the Chalet School also stands apart for following criteria for new, state-funded (day) girls’ high schools more than it does the typical boarding school images: preparing substantial numbers of girls for university; fostering meritocracy; providing academically rigorous instruction in ‘boys’ subjects (mathematics, science, the classics); and professionalising the traditional girls’ subjects.²⁵

The Chalet School is more academic than most fictional schools.²⁶ A leitmotif is that pupils are expected to work hard during lessons and prep, although for their health they are not to work beyond them – a ban which disappoints some girls. Several stories note the school’s academic credentials, on the basis of which the headmistress is chosen to spend a term as a school inspector.²⁷ A couple of books describe girls of a certain age as ‘marks hunters’, while in a third, a new girl who is moved up mid-term in preference to longer-standing form members is reassured that nobody will grudge her the honour, as being moved up at that time will mean forfeiting the hope of a form prize.²⁸ The plot of Adrienne and the Chalet School (1965) centres partly around an established pupil disliking a newcomer for joining her as top of the class. Concomitantly, the role of games is minor. Although interschool matches in tennis, cricket, hockey and lacrosse are played in the Chalet School as elsewhere, games are seldom described in detail, nor is the choice of teams a significant plot element.²⁹ Such an unusually academic emphasis renders it natural for books, reading and libraries to be valued far more in the Chalet School series than in the average school story and for their presentation to be more positive. The challenge remains of how to foreground them.

In a communal world, Brent-Dyer, unlike other authors, achieves this by presenting reading as a communal activity. From the first book in the series to the last, staff regularly read aloud to the juniors during rest periods and to girls of all ages while they are sewing or engaged in hobbies. Titles are occasionally mentioned: The Little Flowers of St Francis; George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind; Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co.; Florence Converse’s The House of Prayer; Swiss Family Robinson.³⁰ When reading to themselves, girls are often congregated: resting in hall after lunch, or in the grounds in hot weather. They are allied by enjoying the same books: ‘Half the form had already revelled in Shadows on the Rock which gives such a vivid picture of life in Quebec at that time, and the other half was waiting anxiously for it.’³¹ Past as well as current reading welds them in a shared culture, with allusions which the characters expect each other to understand: ‘You sound exactly like the Red Queen out of Alice’,³² for example, or: ‘The next day “Mrs Squeers”, as naughty Jo promptly christened her sister, appeared again with her medicine.’³³

Books unite girls in multiple voluntary, sometimes mischievous activities. The younger girls study an encyclopaedia together in order to reset a clock whose slowness results in a slight increase of lesson and decrease in break time.³⁴ They pore over Roget’s Thesaurus for alternatives to forbidden slang, relishing the unusual words they find.³⁵ Unnervingly, they devour Martha Finlay’s Elsie’s Motherhood with each other to learn about the Ku-Klux-Klan for ideas of how to treat the pupils of a rival school.³⁶

Educationalists deplored school stories partly for their use of slang.³⁷ Writers, on the other hand, believed that slang appealed to the books’ target audiences and promoted a sense of realism. Brent-Dyer addressed the problem by allowing girls to speak slang while having the staff crusade regularly against it, and drew intertextual reading into her defence. Sent to school to reform for talking too slangily, Prunella takes revenge by speaking unnaturally stilted English. Series heroine Mary-Lou recounts the plot of Fanny Burney’s Evelina and compares Prunella’s language with that of a Burney heroine.³⁸ Brent-Dyer defends her own reproduction of colloquial language in an explicit message aimed at the censors of girls’ fiction as much as at the readers when Mary-Lou tells Prunella:

No modern girl would read them [Jo Bettany’s books] if they weren’t written in – in modern idiom. You couldn’t expect it.… People must talk like their neighbours or else other folk will think there’s something wrong with them.… Anyhow, the people in Aunt Joey’s books are just like real people and there’s precious few real people nowadays who go around talking as if they’d just had a session with Elizabeth Bennet or Evelina Belmont!³⁹

Twice slang is used in conjunction with communal reading as a significant plot element. In Chapter 9 of Jo of the Chalet School, heroine Jo and her friends retaliate to an attack on slang by speaking Shakespearean English for a day, a prank which requires a week of preparatory reading of Shakespeare’s plays. Several books later the next generation of pupils, having heard of the Shakespearean escapade and inspired by the moan ‘It’s hard lines to have to talk like a Jane Austen heroine’,⁴⁰ decides to speak Regency English in protest. Too lazy to read early nineteenth-century novels in full, they make do with abridgements and with Georgette Heyer. In a lesson that idiom is of its time, the prefects make the Regency speakers behave like Regency girls for a weekend, imitating physically and uncomfortably a world in which they had chosen not to immerse themselves intellectually by reading.⁴¹

In an environment in which reading contributes to the community atmosphere, girls who dislike reading exclude themselves from communal enjoyment. Games depend on books. In Shocks for the Chalet School, mistresses dress as book titles for Saturday evening entertainment, for all to guess: a pleasure for those within a book culture and an impossibility for those outside one, especially as the eclectic titles used are mainly outside the curriculum (J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister; Dorothy Sayers’s Whose Body; Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White).⁴² In A Leader in the Chalet School girls compete to guess the names of charades based on books, mainly of books mentioned elsewhere in the Chalet School series: Das Buch von Trott; Little Women; Anne of Green Gables; Heidi; Nicholas Nickleby; Swiss Family Robinson; Oliver Twist; Sans famille (Hector Malot) and Vanity Fair.⁴³ One character, Jack, is seriously disadvantaged by not being a reader. Competitions involve impersonating characters, either historical or fictitious (Alice in Wonderland; Mrs Malaprop) and finishing verses with book titles.⁴⁴ Reading forms part of the schoolgirl code, with the reading occasionally extending beyond the text to the particular edition: Mary-Lou wears her hair in plaits which are described in several books as ‘Kenwigses’ for their resemblance to illustrations of the Kenwigs women in the edition of Nicholas Nickleby her form reads in class.

Reading bonds girls between schools and represents the power of knowledge when the girls at St Scholastica’s take an idea for a magic cave from a novel for the annual sale they share with the Chalet School:

‘… we got the idea out of one of her [Charlotte M. Yonge’s] books,’ explained Hilary.

‘… It’s the one called The Three Brides.…’

‘We haven’t got The Three Brides,’ said Jo thoughtfully.…

‘But’, complained Cornelia at this point, ‘if we haven’t got it, how under the canopy am I to find out about the Magic Cave?’

‘You can’t. That was the great idea,’ said Hilary calmly.⁴⁵

With these values, the deprivation of reading, rather than the imposition of reading, is a punishment. Use of the school library is described as a privilege of community, and in three books non-conforming girls are threatened with the withdrawal of the right to borrow from its fiction section.⁴⁶ Two books introduce a new matron who, failing to understand the school’s values and ethics, must depart prematurely; in both instances, her sins include stopping girls from reading in bed in the early mornings.⁴⁷

Most Chalet girls explicitly enjoy reading, led by ‘omnivorous’ and ‘insatiable’ reader and series heroine, Jo Bettany; the series begins with twelve-year-old Jo engrossed in Scott’s Quentin Durward, and Jo’s reading is the broadest in the series. The few girls in the series who avowedly dislike reading are either the less pleasant characters (Grizel Cochrane, typically described as ‘hard’), or tomboys like Jack (Jacynth), who prefers working with motors. Most books refer to girls reading for pleasure. Mistresses also relax with light literature such as Richmal Crompton’s More William.⁴⁸ Reading is an expected relaxation: Nina Rutherford, a budding musical genius, is advised to try handcrafts on the basis that as a professional pianist she will spend a great deal of time travelling, when ‘no one can read all the time’.⁴⁹ Rereading favourite books from the Victorian period is common practice, with different girls rereading Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman, Richard Jefferies’ Bevis, Dickens’s Dombey and Son, A.L.O.E.’s The Crown of Success, and Juliana Horatia Ewing’s Six to Sixteen, in the case of Bevis and The Crown of Success (a general Chalet School favourite) for the sixth time.⁵⁰ On the whole the girls enjoy what they read, and whatever books they find laborious are either imposed tasks or books of dubious suitability. Len Maynard struggles with John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, her set holiday reading, but the author hastens to make her add how much she likes his King of the Golden River;⁵¹ when Naomi Elton is ‘not enamoured’ with Humphry Clinker (the reading of which Mary-Lou questions), she shows her delicacy and good taste in disliking a text full of scatological humour.⁵² Unlike their counterparts in other school stories, the girls live surrounded by books. The common rooms, staff room, school secretary’s office, headmistress’s office, matron’s room, and the few homes into which the reader is permitted a glimpse all contain low bookshelves filled with books described approvingly as ‘gaily jacketed’, the type to appeal to the relevant age group. For example:

Opposite, bookcases filled with books of all sorts and in the three official languages of the school … offered an inviting selection to readers.… All in all, it was a really delightful room;⁵³

The room was a large, pleasant one, with pale yellow walls.… Along two of the walls ran low bookcases, crowded and crammed with books of all kinds that folk who had not yet reached the teen age would like.⁵⁴

The presentation of reading draws in the actual reader in her teens or younger, at an age at which children read actively, involving themselves with their reading and identifying with a book’s characters.⁵⁵ Girls who could aspire to an exclusive continental boarding school education only vicariously through the Chalet School titles⁵⁶ could identify with the Chalet girls by reading; to an extent by reading the same books, many of which are established classics. They could participate in the competitions involving books, which are described thoroughly. They could pick up the same literary allusions as the Chalet girls. Indeed, Brent-Dyer encourages reading by offering additional, superfluous literary allusions in her explanatory narrative, such as ‘Mary-Lou who, like Amy of “Little Women” fame, was fond of delicacies’, and ‘Diana Skelton seems to be only step removed from Wordsworth’s idiot boy’.⁵⁷ The actual reader is furthermore in a position to identify parallels between the Chalet School and other books. Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School is especially rich in this respect. The first sentence, ‘There is no disguising the fact that Eustacia Benson was the most arrant little prig that ever existed’, recalls the introductory sentence of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden: ‘When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.’ Eustacia tells tales in similarly pompous language to Paul Bultitude in F. Anstey’s Vice Versa (‘I felt that you ought to know that the two girls in front of me are wasting their time in some babyish games instead of doing as they were bidden’), while an accident in which Eustacia hurts her back is reminiscent of Katy’s accident in What Katy Did. Dr Jem advises Eustacia in a compound of Dr Carr’s and Cousin Helen’s words in Coolidge’s text, and Eustacia learns to appreciate her aunt in illness as Katy did Aunt Izzie.⁵⁸ Elsewhere, Deira, furious with Head Girl Grizel for assigning her the position of Hobbies Prefect, burns Grizel’s harmony book in a scene with shades of Amy burning Jo’s book in Little Women.⁵⁹ It is hard not to regard Primula Mary Venables of The New House at the Chalet School as not having been named after Primula Mary Beton of Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Springdale series, or Dickie Carey’s affectionate reference to her mother as ‘Mother Carey’ not to be based on ‘Mother Carey’ of Charlotte M. Yonge’s Magnum Bonum.

That the Chalet girls are models for reading becomes especially clear in a consideration of titles read. In a fan club newsletter, Brent-Dyer recommends specific well-known children’s classics by Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, Louisa M. Alcott and Susan Coolidge, and anything by Andrew Lang, G. A. Henty, Noel Streatfeild and Rudyard Kipling. She moves into adult territory with titles by John Ruskin (‘ “hard going” but his writing is excellent’), and the works of John Buchan, Dorothy Sayers (specifically the ‘Lord Peter’ books), Jane Austen, Scott, Thackery, Dickens, ‘the great poets’ and ‘the leaders in the best daily papers’.⁶⁰ Subsequently she adds Anthony Trollope, Angela Thirkell, Nancy Spain, Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne, Unforgettable, Unforgotten, by Anna Buchan (alias O. Douglas), Robert Louis Stevenson, Juliana Horatia Ewing and Cynthia Harnett.⁶¹ The choice is sweeping and eclectic, with books from different genres and periods, and the Chalet girls read most of the books or authors named.⁶² Brent-Dyer states that there are ‘hundreds more’ to read,⁶³ and members of the Chalet School read extras too. Except for Shakespeare, the earliest text mentioned is Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775). The Chalet girls read a range of works extending from the late eighteenth century to recent publications, a mixture of children’s fiction (E. Nesbit; Little Women; Martha Finlay’s Elsie book; Arthur Ransome; school stories and others) and general fiction (a great deal of Dickens; George Eliot; Scott; George du Maurier’s Trilby; John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga), with a fair proportion of historical fiction with clear educational overtones, such as Edna Lyall’s In Spite of All and Violet Needham’s The Boy in Red. While some books are mentioned only once, others recur, notably the works of John Buchan, Kipling and Yonge.

The relevance for actual girls is underlined by the fact that although the Chalet girls are educated for much of the series in English, French and German, their recreational reading matter is almost entirely in English, the language of the targeted readers. When Gillian Linton borrows the fairy tale ‘Le Chat de Madame Michel’ (actually Histoire de la Mère Michel et son chat) from the school library it is specifically in order to improve her French,⁶⁴ and other foreign titles appear in the context of books in lessons. Despite the trilingual education and a high proportion of foreign pupils, the textbooks, like the books read for pleasure, have an English base: Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Dickens for English literature; standard readers for other languages, such as Mme de Ségur’s Les Malheurs de Sophie (published in a school edition by Longmans in 1930) and Louis Énault’s Le Chien du capitaine, which appeared for schools by 1890.

The books Brent-Dyer recommends by precept in her newsletter and by intertextual reading in the series are educational, being also those recommended for girls in professional literature for teachers and librarians.⁶⁵ They are part of a broader educative mission, whereby Brent-Dyer recounts local legends, describes towns and their history visited by the girls on excursions, festoons the text with (admittedly execrable) scraps of French and German vocabulary to encourage girls to learn, and presents domestic science lessons with step-by-step instruction for the preparation of food which teaches the reader as well as the Chalet School pupils. Chambers in its blurbs for Chalet School titles in the 1930s advertised them as being ‘as instructive as they are entertaining’.⁶⁶ The appeal was to adults with purchasing power as much as to girls.

Fictional authorship is more prevalent in the Chalet School than in the standard school story. Four girls have fathers who are journalists or naturalists and have written acclaimed books, the school’s music master has produced a monograph on music, Eustacia (now Stacie) Benson’s books on Aeschylus are hailed as authorities, and Lavender Leigh’s aunt in Lavender Laughs at the Chalet School (1943) has penned an entire series of geography readers popular with the Chalet girls. The main author is series heroine Jo Bettany. Jo serves as Brent-Dyer’s fictional mouthpiece and representative. Like Brent-Dyer, Jo produces popular school, adventure, and guides stories and historical novels at a prodigious rate. Her books are invariably beloved of the Chalet School pupils, as Brent-Dyer’s are by her fans, and having read and enjoyed Jo’s books is a sign that a new girl will make good. Jo’s books in the series, like Brent-Dyer’s in fact, are awarded as prizes in competitions. Brent-Dyer advertised her books through her fan club, and through intertextual references within the series, often footnoted. Jo’s authorship is an additional advertisement tool. Nancy Meets a Nazi equates with The Chalet School in Exile, while Jo’s The Lost Staircase is an actual title by Brent-Dyer.⁶⁷

The ‘reality’ of the Chalet School world blurs with the fiction of Jo’s stories within it, as Jo builds pranks and adventures that occur in the Chalet School into her books. The symbiosis between ‘fact’ and fiction is at its greatest when a girl ‘fell back in desperation on an episode she had read in one of her uncle’s old school stories’ to stick a teacher’s drawer closed with cobbler’s wax, and Jo reacts with: ‘What a gaudy episode for my new school yarn! Thanks a million! It’s just what I wanted!’⁶⁸ Jo hereby reflects her creator, who both based incidents in her fiction on activities in the Margaret Roper School she ran in Herefordshire between 1938 and 1948 and modelled elements of the Margaret Roper School on the Chalet School.⁶⁹ The relationship of the later Chalet girls to Jo, the successful writer, equates on one level that between fans and Brent-Dyer. The parallel enables readers to identify still more closely with the Chalet School.

The Chalet School follows the standard topos of presenting unrealistic intradiegetic schoolgirl fiction within the ‘authentic’ fiction. Much of this occurs when the school is being formed and its Continental pupils avidly read English girls’ school stories as a point of reference.⁷⁰ It falls to Jo as an English girl from an English school to describe the stories as ‘tosh’ and to protest:

‘But it says so in the books I have read,’ persisted the elder girl.

‘But that’s only to make the story,’ explained Jo. ‘We don’t really do such things – honest Injun, Gertrud!’⁷¹

Once the school has been established, the fiction recedes, to reappear only briefly as new girls must correct erroneous imaginings. The example of Rosalind Lilley, who fears snobbery on the basis of her reading, has been noted above. In a chapter entitled ‘The Result of Too Many School Stories’, Polly Heriot, who has read many school stories and assumed them to be mimetic, rings the fire bell in the middle of the night in imitation of Pat, the Pride of the School (not a real title), thereby rousing the entire valley. Jo consequently ‘sat down that afternoon to review her own book, and with a stern hand she remorselessly removed any pranks therefrom that might be supposed to incite brainless Juniors to imitation thereof’.⁷²

Yet the inspiration of school stories is not always bad. In Carola Storms the Chalet School (the eponymous heroine of which is also imbued with school stories, and must adjust her perceptions), the prefects reform pupils’ language by making them write down the true meanings of words they use as slang, an idea gained from a fictitious school story.⁷³ Brent-Dyer recommends certain school stories through the reading of her characters. Gwensi Howell in The Chalet School Goes To It has shelves full of the books of Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Winifred Darch and Elsie Oxenham as well as of the fictional Jo Bettany.⁷⁴ Bruce, Oxenham and, obliquely, Phyllis Matthewman appear elsewhere in the series. In a late book, Adrienne and the Chalet School (1965), Adrienne, like the Chalet School’s earliest foreign pupils, reads school stories (in this instance Jo’s) for guidance and learns from them the characteristics of the ideal schoolgirl:

During the long and often wearisome convalescence, she had brought the girl school stories written by this sister of hers, Mme Maynard. Adrienne had never read any tales like this and it did not take her long to discover what kind of girl both the author and Soeur Cécile preferred. She must be truthful and honest, working and playing with all her might, faithful to her promises, kind, loyal, above talking maliciously about other girls. These were the main points to strike Adrienne – though later she was to find others.⁷⁵

Adrienne is academically ambitious, an accepted ‘slogger’ and high achiever. Unlike Polly, she illustrates the quality of discerning reading, distilling qualities from plot and realising that what is to be imitated is the best of the values, not the incidents of mischievous girls. In this way books read – Jo’s and, by implication, Brent-Dyer’s – represent an inner truth. The reader learns to read in a way to derive moral benefit from school stories.

Reading has its times and places. It must not make girls unpunctual, as it does Eustacia.⁷⁶ Richenda Fry must learn not to read while dressing, Ruey Richardson not to interrupt her preparation time with novel-reading.⁷⁷ Within these constraints, failure to read when one is supposed to be reading is what repeatedly causes trouble. The possible dire consequences of being immersed in a book and so oblivious to one’s surroundings are never mentioned. But because Madge Bettany falls asleep over her book instead of reading it, she fails to notice an impending storm and she and the girls under her care are trapped by it.⁷⁸ Recalcitrant girls plot silly deeds, such as running away, or evil ones, such as taking revenge on a classmate, instead of concentrating on the book before them, as in: ‘The one idea of “showing them” filled her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and as she sat with Henry Esmond open before her, Grizel was busily making plans for the morrow’⁷⁹ and: ‘Betty, sprawled on a near-by settee, pretended to be deep in Prester John’, when listening to chatter which gives her a handle on how to ‘pay off all scores’.⁸⁰ Reading is connected with tranquillity and with bodily safety; the pretence or neglect of reading with mental anguish and with physical danger.

Books may be acceptable in certain contexts, but not in others. Brent-Dyer recommends Dorothy Sayers and role-model schoolgirl Mary-Lou admits: ‘I rather love a really good whodunnit, don’t you?’⁸¹ Yet detective stories are generally the butt of disparaging remarks, such as: ‘That is what comes of reading so many detective novels … If you’d leave thrillers alone, all of you, and try something sensible, you wouldn’t be so ready to look for the worst before it happened’; ‘It’s high time someone looked after your reading.’⁸² Redheads at the Chalet School takes on elements of the detective story as evil forces attempt to kidnap the daughter of a detective who has harmed their gang. The detective story, ‘real’ as in Redheads or obviously fictitious, signifies too much danger to the safe, enclosed world of school. Ghost stories or innocuous legends become ‘bad’ reading when told to excitable children too close to bedtime, inducing nightmares. As distinctions are made, readers are expected to discriminate between appropriate and inappropriate reading matter. ‘I wonder what she’s been reading during the hols?’ is a refrain when girls have impractical ideas.⁸³ While Miss Derwent vets books brought into school, staff acknowledge that they cannot influence what girls read outside the confinements of school and, towards the end of the series, that television and the cinema can also influence girls’ minds. In providing so many suggestions of reading of her own – a greater quantity within the pages of the Chalet School series than in the fan newsletter – Brent-Dyer attempts to guide her readers’ reading and to equip them to discriminate.

A report by the Board of Education in 1910/11 had commented on the need in any well-equipped school for a small fiction library of historical novels and books of adventure.⁸⁴ Within girls’ schools generally, the existence of the school library is a status symbol. It is a quiet place where (mainly senior) girls work. Brent-Dyer makes it far more prominent. It is particularly salient in Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School, in which Eustacia, new and accustomed to solitude, seeks the library out when it is closed and suffers so bitterly from having it banned to her that she ultimately runs away. But it appears in most books. A standard ritual of the new school year is assignment of duties among the prefects, whereby one girl is always the library prefect, later assisted by a second girl for the junior library. All three of Brent-Dyer’s major schoolgirl role models, Jo Bettany, her daughter Len and Mary-Lou Trelawney, are library prefects before progressing to become head girl. The library is noted as a good one, with regular donations of books or money by girls when they leave, and it contributes to the academic reputation of the Chalet School. When the school splits between England and Switzerland, a chapter is assigned to dividing books between the two branches, and Summer Term at the Chalet School devotes a chapter to the process of book selection, with each form suggesting the acquisition of three works of fiction and three of non-fiction.⁸⁵ These and a library stocktake which reveals certain implicitly popular books to be missing⁸⁶ provide the opportunity in a short space to mention and tacitly to recommend many actual titles, while the fact of the library is an additional link between the Chalet School and its readers.

Occasionally the library appears as a physical space. In Redheads at the Chalet School, it is from the library that Len Maynard spies the kidnapping villain snooping around, and enough of the library layout is described to explain how Len could observe without danger of being seen.⁸⁷ When the school celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, library architecture comes into play with a suggestion to erect a purpose-built library, which some girls think could allow a better overview and prevent books from being mistreated or going missing.⁸⁸ Brent-Dyer follows an actual trend, writing this as school libraries were becoming increasingly important.⁸⁹

The library offers an added opportunity for the girls to demonstrate autonomy: they appear to do everything in the library, and the supervisory role of a mistress is shadowy. In another expression of female empowerment, the Chalet School offers one example of a pupil wanting to become a librarian and knowing about the training and the most prestigious positions:

‘I want to be a librarian ’cos I love books so much. I’m going to Oxford first to get my B.A., and then I’ll have to take special library training, and go in for the librarian exams. But it’ll be well worth it. I’d like,’ she added modestly, ‘to get a post as librarian at the Bodleian, or else at Windsor Castle. Something like that, you know. Or the British Museum wouldn’t be too bad.’

‘You don’t want much!’ cried Daisy. ‘The Bodleian, Windsor, or the British Museum! Upon my word, Bride, you don’t lack for cheek!’⁹⁰

None of Brent-Dyer’s girls demonstrates the bibliophily of Antonia Forest’s Nicola Marlow, who chooses the Iliad as a school prize for its appearance – ‘two vellum-bound, gold-patterned volumes dated 1834, printed in Greek with the notes in Latin: utterly fabulous and gloriously incomprehensible’ – and who exchanges her share in a donkey for a facsimile of Shakespeare’s First Folio, entranced by the type and the preliminaries.⁹¹ But Brent-Dyer does discuss the treatment of books. Library books require repair; older girls mourn the rough treatment of books by younger ones, which may result in the loss of pages or the tearing of the spine;⁹² Eustacia defends her handling of a book by her knowing how to treat books respectfully; books may be out of bounds not just for content, but for their value.⁹³ All books have a life thereby and are to be respected. Jo’s proofs, the first form of her books, recur, described in their physicality as ‘paper eels’.⁹⁴ The rounded presentation of books as artefacts as well as carriers of content raises appreciation for the printed word.

Successful as she indubitably was, few would describe Elinor Brent-Dyer as a skilful writer, especially in her later Chalet School books with their worn plots. Yet she transforms the school story by turning the games-mad institution to one with an intellectual emphasis, while retaining readers. She advertises her books skilfully through her characters’ love of reading, portrays the unportrayable solitary activity as an enjoyable, often communal, one, and guides her readers to broad, sound reading through the reading of her characters. She instils a respect for books into her readers. Repeated references to reading in particular situations, to bookshelves, to library duties and to certain authors and titles contribute to the series element which above all renders the Chalet School books enduring.⁹⁵ Brent-Dyer uses reading in her books as an educational vehicle which gains adult approval without deterring her target audience. She adroitly blends self-promotion with an altruistic mission. This is a legacy of which to be proud.