The Chalet School series - Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
Elinor was born in South Shields. After a turbulent childhood she became a teacher and wrote school stories as a hobby and to entertain her young friend Hazel Bainbridge, an actress who, incidentally, went on to be the mother of Dynasty star Kate O’Mara. In 1925 The School at the Chalet was published. It tells the story of Madge, a British 24-year-old who starts a school in the Alps. Her little sister, Joey, is the school’s first pupil and rather mischievous. The book was a success and spawned over fifty sequels starring Joey and many other girls and teachers. The series still has a huge fan base today with readers all over the world. However, many of these readers are older than me and I am keen to bring the books to a new generation.
Why should you read the Chalet School? First, of course, there is the location: Tyrol. It makes a lovely change to read about skiing, skating and snowball fights instead of hockey and lacrosse and to marvel at ice festivals, gypsy musicians and elaborate Tyrolean weddings in place of fairs and circuses. The rise of Hitler unfortunately forces the school to leave Austria and they re-establish themselves in the UK. They later move to a Welsh island, where they have some hair-raising nautical adventures, before finally settling in Switzerland.
A second element that sets the series apart is that, while many school stories start on the first day of term and end on the last, we see the Chalet School girls during the holidays and get glimpses of their family and home lives. Some school story characters have one defining trait, like the joker or horsewoman, whereas the Chalet girls are three-dimensional and feel more like real people. We also get to see them grow up as the series spans approximately 25 years, taking Joey from the age of twelve to her late thirties.
The wide time span also allows the series to cover a huge chunk of history and the fact that it was written in “real time” makes the books fascinating. The Third Reich and World War II feature heavily in the books and I was amazed and impressed at some of the things the author dared to say about “Hitty” and the Nazis considering that Britain was at war with them. She also differentiated between Germans and Nazis – pointing out that many of the former didn’t like the situation, either – an attitude that was quite unusual at the time.
I believe that some of the books should be read in schools, as they show the human side of 20th Century history. Besides the war we see history in action in the form of improvements in technology and transport, the fight against TB – in which Joey’s husband is a lead doctor – and women becoming more liberated. For example, at the start many girls expect to go home after finishing their education to help their mothers and wait for someone to propose to them whereas, by the end, most girls are going into careers, some as exotic as gardening, ceramics and archaeology.
There are many happy moments balancing out the sad. There are weddings and celebrations, some top-class pranks and jokes which are just as funny eighty years later. There is also a ridiculous number of twins in the series – Joey gives birth to triplets and two sets of twins, Madge has twins, their brother, Dick, has two sets and Madge and Dick are twins themselves. It’s befuddling but highly amusing.
I hope that I have enticed you to try out the Chalet School. Some of the later books are rare because they were only reprinted once and have become collectors’ items, but the first fifteen or so books have had numerous reprints and are fairly easy to get hold of. I am so thankful I picked up and read Rivals of the Chalet School at the recommendation of a teacher. I have discovered two glorious new worlds, one inside the books and one outside in the form of the fan community. I even got my Twitter name, Grizonne, from two Chalet characters: Grizel and Con. The series is a big part of my life and I hope you will enjoy it too.
*This review was originally written for Cuckoo Review (New Writing North) and is reprinted with permission*
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