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Posted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 8:01 amPosted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 8:30 amPosted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 8:33 amPosted: Thu Aug 24, 2006 9:57 amPosted: Thu May 17, 2007 7:58 pm| Quote: |
| I:
Well it was during the 1940s that Enid Blyton wrote most of her famous
boarding school books (St. Clares, Mallory Towers and the Naughtiest
Girl in the School series) – three decades later I devoured them all,
engrossed by the pranks, the minor feuds, and the friendships restored
over lashings of lemonade. I hadn’t read them since school, but
apparently a growing number of us have turned back to these and other
tales of a bygone era. Gymslip fiction is in. Why? The Reverend
Clarissa Cridland co-founded Girls Gone By Publishing and Sue Sims
co-wrote The Encyclopaedia of Girls’ School Stories. Sue, which books
are we reading and who exactly is reading them?
S: Well the books we’re reading I suppose would be people like Elsie Jeanette Oxenham, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Joanna Lloyd, Margaret Biggs, Winifred Darch, Evelyn Smith and perhaps most of all, of course, Elinor Brent-Dyer. And who’s reading them... Mostly, at the moment, I would say, people in their late twenties, but most of all, thirties, forties and fifties, remembering their own childhood reading, and just wanting to recover, I suppose, some of the joy of reading those school stories. I: Well you mentioned Elinor Brent-Dyer. She wrote the longest running series of books, the Chalet series, which ran to sixty books and the first was published in 1925, it’s called School at the Chalet, and let’s hear an excerpt. Mademoiselle ... struggled with the chalk. Not one mark could she make ... the door opened and the headmistress entered, white with anger ... ‘Madame ... the chalk will not write!’ ‘I know,’ said her Head in low tones. She advanced to the board and drew her hand down it in one sweep. Then she looked at her palm. ‘ As I thought,’ she said. ‘ Which of you has vaselined all the blackboards?’ There was a deathly silence ... Miss Bettany suddenly struck the desk with her hand. Everyone jumped. ‘Who did it?’ she demanded. ‘Is there a coward in the school?’ On the word, Grizel sprang to her feet, head up, eyes blazing defiance. ‘I did it!’ she said, as insolently as she dared. I: Clarissa, what impact did books like that have on you? C: I think that they gave me a great sense of enjoyment. They also fulfilled – they were a wish for me – I wanted to go to a school like the Chalet School – and I think they fulfilled that wish partly. That there was also the excitement of really getting to know the characters because the books – it was – it was a very long series, from one to sixty, and we saw the characters from their schooldays, through growing up, and having children of their own – you really did feel that you knew them and you wanted to know what happened next. I: And you’re republishing many of these schoolgirl books. Why do you think they’ve become so popular now? C: I don’t actually think they’ve ever stopped being popular, at least certainly not in the case of the Chalet School books, because although they went out of print in hardback, Armada published them in paperback, and I can remember the Armada editor telling me that when she got there in the 1970s, the first thing she thought was ‘Well I’ll get rid of those Chalet School stories’ but then she looked at the sales figures and she found that the sales figures were absolutely huge and they kept on selling so that although some of the other titles had gone out of print, the Chalet School books have never ever been out of print and they are now being rediscovered by people and also being brought to a new audience. I: Well many of these books are very old fashioned tales, and they evoke a safe and secure era. Sue, do you think that this is sort of pure nostalgia for the middle classes if you like? S: (laughing) I think there’s an element of nostalgia – I think it would be silly to say there isn’t. I’m an English teacher myself, at a girls’ grammar school and I’ve found that it’s now a minority of actual real life children who actually read these things, though there is still that minority and they still do enjoy it. So yes I think it’s partly nostalgia. I think it’s partly, as Clarissa said, that yearning for a world that’s completely secure; it’s the soap opera syndrome, as again she mentioned, that’s one of the reasons why when one sells these books, one finds that it’s the series books which sell, and the one off people, like Angela Brazil who wrote, oh, two or three paired books, but apart from that, her very long line of writing’s no repetition, no series, and people buy her, but she’s not collected with the same avidity that someone like Elinor Brent-Dyer or Antonia Forest is collected. I: And do you think any of the characters actually empowered women? Were they role models at all? S: You will find a lot of people in this world who are very keen on that idea, I’m sure it’s true. Rosemary Auchmuty, who edited the Encyclopaedia of Boys and Girls School Stories, that’s one of her major lines of argument. For myself, I don’t think that was a concious perception, frankly. I think I loved much more the wish fulfilment idea. I: And you also liked Anthony, Antonia rather, Forest, I believe, you’re a collector. S: Yes, yes indeed. I: Well let’s hear an excerpt of her book, Autumn Term, in which Nicola is at breakfast with her new found friend, Tim Keith, the headmistress’ niece. “Sit up, Tim and Nicola, and don’t be silly,” said Miss Cartwright cheerfully. “Where did that pear come from, Tim?” Nicola jumped and blushed. Tim said, “I brought it with me.” “From home?” Now it would come thought Nicola miserably. And Tim would probably feel frightfully silly, saying she’d taken it from Aunt Edith’s garden. “Yes Miss Cartwright,” said Tim’s voice easily. Nicola gasped. A small choked sound, unheard in the steady din of the dining hall. I: Interesting there, Clarissa, that we’ve got a girl with a boy’s name. That seems to crop up quite often in this fiction, almost as if these books are directly copying the boys’ books, like Tom Brown’s Schooldays. C: I don’t think it probably happened any more than it happened in real life. I mean, you know, I can remember friends’ names who had boys’ names as shorts, and I’m sure Sue can as well. I don’t think it was a particular thing, I think it emulated what was going on in the real world, but equally, very often the girls who had boys’ names were very interesting and were slightly out of the ordinary, which always helped things along. I: Do you think, Sue, it was upholding some sort of masculine ideal, with the use of these tomboy characters? S: No, (laughing) not at all. The tomboy is a character you find in girls’ fiction, as indeed in real life, going right back. I think the first tomboy I’ve come across is a book from the 1860s, it’s certainly not a particularly modern thing. The only thing difference being that in the 1860s the tomboys and the wild girls, as it were, have to reform, the author doesn’t approve of them, whereas as you come up more during the first world war and into the 1920s, they are very often the people with whom the reader is actually invited to identify. I: And there we had Tim – he lies – he, rather she!- lies (laughing) and does the dishonourable thing. How much is the theme of honour used in this genre? S/C?: It’s vital. From about the 1920s on wards, it largely replaces concious religious material in the books and I think, again, I would not say this was copying boys school stories precisely, so much as the actual girls’ schools, but then we have to say that the girls’ schools, where honour was concerned, they were copying the boys’ schools. The whole public schools spirit was very carefully inculcated in the girls’ schools, and ironically the boys schools, the boys schools stories writers, by the time you get to the 1920s, they left the theme of honour largely behind, they had gone onto other things. But the girls were all fervently worrying about betraying their friends and being honest and owning up, and all the rest of it. I: And this type of school book for girls seemed to die out in the early 1970s – what happened, Clarissa? C: Libraries stopped buying hardback fictions – school fiction in the same way. They went much more onto literary fiction and there was a general move towards publishing more literary fiction and not so much fiction that was actually being bought. That was in hardback. But in paperback, these books were being reprinted, as I said, and generally speaking, publishers just changed what they were doing. I started in publishing in 1976 and it was the end of one era and the starting of another era, with publishers changing their lists, and thinking more about what they thought children should read, rather than necessarily what children wanted to read. I: And very briefly Sue, you mentioned you teach at school and some girls read this, but not a lot, do you think this genre of fiction will die out, that it has a limited shelf life? S: Depends how you find this genre of fiction. I would say that there are still literally hundreds of school stories, in one sense, being produced every year, but they tend to be stories set in mixed comprehensives, or indeed in boarding schools, like Harry Potter, there’s a very big line in fantasy boarding schools, so presumably starting off partly from J K Rowling... I: So it will move on in some form or another? S: In some form, it will live on. Yes. I: Okay, Sue Sims and Clarissa Cridland, thanks to you both very much. And if these books bring back memories for you, then do let us know, via our website message board bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour |
Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 8:07 pmPosted: Thu May 17, 2007 8:28 pm
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