It really surprises me that Beechy is so late in date - it's so much less sophisticated than Chalet Girl from Kenya and reads like an earlier book. I suppose you feel the lack of a very richly-characterised school, with lots of well-developed characters and locations in all EBD's non-CS books. Would people who have read her other series (I haven't) say that in general her best work is in the CS books, or is it more that she writes better in series in general, rather than stand-alone books?
This has lots of CS things, like a ghost story that ends in a sleepwalker rousing the whole school, a girl who has a 'devil who makes her do things', an illness for the heroine, and a villain who dislikes the devout, half-Italian heroine (but calls her a 'half-Dago' at one point, which would never happen at the CS!)
Is this another of the Sunday School prize books, given the very clunky religious element that tends to arrive out of the blue? Here, Beechy, arriving at her recently-dead mother's old school, has literally been in the school five minutes, and is unpacking:
Quote: Beechy felt that in Miss Eliot and Matron she had found two people who would stand by her. [...] young though she was she sensed that the thing they had in common was a love in their hearts for God.
As Beechy helped Matron to put the little cubicle tidy, her mind went back to the night a few weeks ago when she had knelt by her mother’s bed and asked the Lord Jesus to come into her heart. She knew then that, all too soon, life would alter for her and had determined that, wherever she had to go, she would be God’s little messenger.
There's no basis whatsoever for Beechy to think Matron or Miss Eliot has any particularly strong religious belief at all in the five minutes she's known then, so this reads very oddly!
But the whole 'asking the Lord Jesus to come into her heart' thing seems new to me, and very non-CS. It sounds neither particularly C of E or classically Catholic - which religious groups tend to talk about being saved and 'asking the Lord into your heart'? Also, another difference from the CS is that we're not told whether Beechy is Catholic or Protestant - she keeps talking about 'becoming a Christian' as though she wasn't always, but surely her devout (presumably Catholic) mother wouldn't have allowed her to grow up with no faith? So why the kind of 'born again' rhetoric? Something to do with the readership?
The other interesting thing is very un-CS, that there's no publicly religious behaviour or bedside prayers at the Harbour School - in fact there seems to be some implication that the other girls aren't Christian, or aren't 'proper' Christians the way Beechy is? There is another slightly weird bit where religion gets pitchforked into a completely secular situation, where Beechy has done unexpectedly well in an essay and is being asked by her classmates how she did it:
Quote: How she wished she could have been brave enough to add “and I prayed about it too.” But for too long she had kept it dark that she was a Christian. .. . it just “wasn’t done” to talk about religion at The Harbour School.
It's actually kind of interesting to see what EBD lets happen in a school she doesn't present as idealistically as the CS - here you have no 'public' religion, and apparently no cubicle prayer time (Beechy is too timid to be the only one kneeling by her bed), deliberately offensive anti-foreigner language used by the villain, and the ghost story is got from one of the girls 'gossiping with the maids', which is seen as her main sin in the episode...
|
. I haven't got 
