“We are proud to belong to such a school”

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I’ve now returned to a very warm Brisbane and am still gathering my thoughts as to what to write about the funeral.  It was lovely, and I very much appreciated the opportunity to grieve with my family.  But for now, I plan to blather on a lighter note about my latest reading project.

I have always been a fan of boarding school stories - I loved reading Enid Blyton’s two boarding school series (Malory Towers and St Clares), and then moved onto the enormous Chalet School series, which comprises some 60 books (not including those books published by other authors about school terms that Elinor M Brent-Dyer never got around to writing about).

There’s a reasonable number of fan sites and organisations - the two main clubs are the New Chalet Club, which has great synopses of all the Chalet books, and Friends of the Chalet School, which has a less comprehensive website.  Naturally, where there are fans, there is fanfic, and The Sally Denny Library has a great collection of fic written by various authors.  The Chaletian Bulletin Board is a message board with fic and various discussions on particular books, characters and themes.

I haven’t read all 60 of the Chalet books, mostly because a lot of them are terribly hard to get hold of.  My local library doesn’t own any, so I’ve bought the first few in the series cheaply from Ebay.  However, many of the rarer volumes fetch high prices that I’m not generally willing to pay.  The Library on this site hosts transcripts of those books that are no longer in print - you have to register in order to be able to access the library, and you won’t be notified when your registration has been successful - just try logging in at a later time.

For a more academic exploration of the appeal of these books, The World of the Chalet School is part of a larger thesis regarding British schoolgirl stories, their place in history and their portrayal of adolescence.

I’ve got through the first three books so far (they certainly don’t take long to read), and am now reading the first “fill in”novel by Helen McClelland, Visitors for the Chalet School.  McClelland imitates Brent-Dyer’s writing style extremely well, and it’s rather fun having a “lost” term filled in before I read onto the next official Brent-Dyer volume in the series.

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