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#1: Too much information? Author: Lisa A., Location: North Yorkshire

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 4:58 pm
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My favourite EBD book is Lorna at Wynyards and I have just finished reading the sequel, Stepsisters for Lorna. I think Wynyards is a lovely book, very gentle and mannered with lots of detail about family and school life. Without a cast of thousands, EBD seems to have had time to develop a number of interesting and engaging characters and flesh out a "new girl struggles to fit in" plot in an original and realistic way. I can't find any EBDisms (although I am not observant) - all the family members and timings link up nicely. It is one of my favourite comfort reads. The sequel I thought was much weaker - again new girls struggling to fit in but here EBD has buzzed through the set pieces at a rate of knot and I couldn't get into it at all.

So my question is: would it have been better if EBD had made a smaller universe (not fewer books) and spent more time developing the stories of perhaps three or four families and the people that surround them?

#2: Author: Squirrel, Location: St-Andrews or Dunfermline

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:15 pm
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Hmmmm - I can't comment on the 'Lorna' books, having never read them, but I guess that is something like what you had with the earliest CS books - and possibly the La Rochelle series, though again, I know very little about them. I think that when an author has so few charachters it can be even harder to keep things fresh - which is probably why we get the Jo and teachers being consistant later on in the series, but glimpses of girls that we rarely see later on as the CS story moves on.

#3: Author: Clare, Location: Liverpool

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:05 pm
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I do like the Lorna books and agree with everything you've said Lisa.

As Squirrel says I could imagine it being very difficult to keep the stories fresh and interesting. Though people did say that about the Royle Family (how can you watch a TV show about people watching TV?) and that was a fantastic programme!

It may have been difficult for her to write it for her intended audience - Kit would presumably got married and you would have had to meet said intended husband before the big day, because if the world if so small you can't get away with "oh, did you hear about..." It would have to be dealt with, and EBD wasn't always at her best with romantic scenes...

#4: Author: Katherine, Location: London, UK

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:17 pm
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Possibly. I do feel that later on there is a lot of introduction of people who then fade away to nothing. I really wish she had developed the children of the old girls other the the MBR clan.
I feel there was so much potential that she wasted.When I read the early ones I remember thinking 'Oh it'll be cool when Peggy/Natalie Mensch isat the school and we can follow them though. Okay we get Peggy as Head Girl but Natalie? Hardly anything. Mind you, if she'd done that we'd probably have accused her of rambling on about minor Tyrol characters that no one cared about.
For example in HP5 Order of the Phoenix I get frustrated that it takes the story so long to reach school. Perhaps if there were books about other CS characters away from the CS I'd make the same complaint.

#5: Re: Too much information? Author: Róisín, Location: Gaillimh

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 8:33 pm
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Lisa A. wrote:

... made a smaller universe (not fewer books) and spent more time developing the stories of perhaps three or four families and the people that surround them?

A very Austenesque method, which funnily enough, EBD recommends following in the newsletters.

#6: Author: Mel, Location: UP NORTH

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 10:29 pm
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I think she certainly could have avoided making the school so huge in the later books. Obviously she wanted it to be successful, but she could not envisage the reality of a school of 400+ The catering alone would be a nightmare for Karen and her minions.

#7: Author: Pat, Location: Doncaster

Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 10:43 pm
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And the Christmas Play still has parts for everyone!!!

#8: Author: Caroline, Location: Manchester

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 9:44 am
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Mel wrote:

I think she certainly could have avoided making the school so huge in the later books. Obviously she wanted it to be successful, but she could not envisage the reality of a school of 400+ The catering alone would be a nightmare for Karen and her minions.

I agree. And really, I don't get a sense of the school actually being that big at all. So, the only way we know the school is that big is becuase EBD keeps telling us so. I suspect she does this mainly becuase she wants us to perceive the school as successful, and an ever increasing school roll is the easiest way to demonstrate this.

Although, if you add up the number of forms in the school and multiply by say 20 for the number of girls, you do end up with 340 girls (assuming 17 different forms from KG to U6).

Just think, with less girls EBD could have actually created a form structure that made sense.....

#9: Author: Mrs Redboots, Location: London, UK

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 12:25 pm
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Mel wrote:

Obviously she wanted it to be successful, but she could not envisage the reality of a school of 400+ The catering alone would be a nightmare for Karen and her minions.

Not impossible, though - the school I was at managed very successfully, although I think numbers for lunch were probably nearer 300 than 400. But the food was never that good.... edible, but no more than that! They could, and did, do wonderful spreads for things like Speech Day when parents were expected, though.

#10: Author: jennifer, Location: Taiwan

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 3:47 pm
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Caroline wrote:

Mel wrote:

I think it does affect the stories in about the last eight books. I find the characters get less focused in those books - too many girls but with not enough time spent on any one group to make you really get to know them. From Jane onwards we have books focussing on Jane, Jose, Adrienne and Dilys (Jane) Jack and her Gang (Redheads, Sams), Adrienne, Janice, Judy and Ailie (Adrienne), Erica, Agneta, Nita and their friends (Summer), Upper V (challenge), Jocelyn Marvell and Lower IV (challenge), Robina, Samaris, Fredrika and their form (sams), Althea, Val Pertwee, Brigit and their friends (Althea), and the triplets and their friends (Prefects) - that's nine groups of girls in eight books!

#11: Author: Caroline, Location: Manchester

Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2007 4:05 pm
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Good point - EBD sure did jump around a lot in those last books, and a lot of the large forms of younger girls she talks about come across as two dimensional in the extreme. Just a bunch of names rather than actual characters...

I actually really liked meeting the Upper V in Challenge - and that's the one title of the last bunch that I really feel works. I'm not desperately keen on Jocelyn Marvell and chums, but I can see what EBD was trying to do there, with a bunch of older girls counterpointed against a younger form, and the staff also grappling with a new situation. And for once it's not a total rehash of an old plot.

#12: Author: Loryat,

Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 4:04 pm
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I always liked that there were so many characters. It made me feel like it was really real. (Though of course I knew it wasn't). I don't think EBD was at the peak of her powers in the last few books and it isn't cos there are so many characters but she was just going downhill, sad to say. (Not that there aren't odd flashes of brilliance to be found).

When you think about it, the earlier books have tons of really well developed characters and multiple storylines. School At has Madge venturing out alone, Joey being Joey, Grizel, Juliet and her parents, development of Tyrol, Simone's infatuation with Joey and Gisela developing as a HG. The other earlier books have Joey and her friends, the Quintette, and random others.

I think the strength of these earlier books is that while Joey is of course the central character, the action doesn't stick with her but moves freely from form to form. Later books tend to focus far more closely on a single character and you get a jumpy effect when EBD decides it's time for a middles prank/prefects discussion.

#13: Author: Alison H, Location: Manchester

Posted: Fri Mar 16, 2007 4:15 pm
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I think it makes a difference that the later books run sequentially and the earlier books don't. For example, Grizel goes from being a naughty Middle to being Head Girl within 4 books. Even Joey's schooldays only last for 12 books (counting Lintons/Rebel as 2 rather than 1).

Later on, there's one book per term, and sometimes books covering the summer holidays as well, so if someone was at the school from 11 to 18 then their schooldays'd cover 21 books minimum. Whilst I prefer not having the "gaps" and wish that there were no gaps in the Tyrol books, it'd probably be very hard to think of enough storylines for one group of girls to fill 21+ books.

There is an awful lot of jumping around in the later books though. And I wish she'd written more about people like Natalie Mensch, Josefa von und zu Wertheim, Tessa de Bersac, etc, whose families we already "knew".

#14: Author: jennifer, Location: Taiwan

Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 6:01 am
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Up until the last few books, EBD tends to concentrate on a few main groups at a time, with other forms appearing in passing. They are generally spread out, so we are concentrating on one group of junior middles, one of middles and one of seniors. It also explains why periodically we have a year where the prefects are all minor characters - that's not one of the focal years.

If you look at the Swiss books from Barbara - Triplets, the stories generally feature the triplets and their form(s), Mary-Lou's gang and their form(s) and Jack's Gang. Focal new girls all go into those forms: Barbara, Jo, Prunella, Jessica, Nina, Rosamund + Joan, Richenda, Naomi, Ted, Ruey etc. If one group is the focal group, the other appears in the secondary story line. ML and Co are prefects when the triplets are middles and younger seniors, whle the triplets are prefects when Jack is a middle. The exceptions are Trials, where we see more of Janice, Judy and Ailie, and Trick, which atypically focuses on girls who are not students.

I suspect that by about triplets EBD was looking to expand to a new focal group - at that point we had the triplets as prefects and Jack's gang as naughty middles, so she needed a new, younger group to add to the mix as up and coming naughty middles for Jack's Gang to be prefects to.

However, as I iterated in a previous post, she can't seem to make up her mind. We have a series of books about different forms, none of which really have enough writing invested in them to become real.

If the series had continued, it would be interesting to see which group won out.

#15: Author: skye,

Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 11:02 am
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jennifer wrote:

Up until the last few books, EBD tends to concentrate on a few main groups at a time, with other forms appearing in passing. They are generally spread out, so we are concentrating on one group of junior middles, one of middles and one of seniors. It also explains why periodically we have a year where the prefects are all minor characters - that's not one of the focal years.

I suspect that by about triplets EBD was looking to expand to a new focal group - at that point we had the triplets as prefects and Jack's gang as naughty middles, so she needed a new, younger group to add to the mix as up and coming naughty middles for Jack's Gang to be prefects to.

However, as I iterated in a previous post, she can't seem to make up her mind. We have a series of books about different forms, none of which really have enough writing invested in them to become real.

If the series had continued, it would be interesting to see which group won out.

It seems to be agreed that the final two books were not written by EBD and that would explain why the development of the characters (and the series), comes to an end. It was more a case of painting by numbers during those final books rather than establishing new characters to flow through into the future.

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