Elinor M.Brent-Dyer (1894–1969), all achieved their popularity through the production
of series.
Elsie Jeanette Oxenham, the daughter of the journalist and author, John Oxenham,
may have had ambitions to write for adults. Her early stories were mildly romantic
family tales, but in 1913 she published Rosaly’s New School, which has a strong school
interest, and, in the following year, Girls of the Hamlet Club, the first story in the long
sequence of Abbey stories, into which most of her books eventually linked. The mainly
day-school in Girls of the Hamlet Club has recently opened its doors to less wealthy girls
who live in the nearby hamlets. Cicely Hobart comes to the area to be near her maternal
grandparents, who had not approved of their now dead daughter’s marriage, goes to the
school and is appalled by the snobbery and the way in which the hamlet girls are
outsiders. She befriends them, organises them into the Hamlet Club, with the motto, ‘To
be or not to be’, and arranges country rambles and folk dancing sessions for them.
Cicely meets, and is accepted by, her grandparents, and also unites the school by
persuading the Hamlet Club to provide a programme of dances when the official school
play has to be cancelled because of illness. In The Abbey Girls (1920), the Hamlet Club
members visit the Abbey, where Mrs Shirley is caretaker; they meet her daughter, Joan,
and Cicely arranges for Joan to have a scholarship to the school. Joan sacrifices this to
her cousin, Joy, whom she feels needs the discipline of school. Fortunately, Joy is
eventually reconciled with her grandfather (he too had disapproved of his daughter’s
marriage), and both girls are able to go to the school, join the Hamlet Club and in due
course become May Queens. In Oxenham’s last book, Two Queens at the Abbey (1959),
Joy’s twin daughters are crowned joint Queens. In many of the Abbey books, school is
peripheral to the main interest, which centres on the Abbey and the girls who come to
live with Joy in the house which she has inherited from her grandfather. However, they
were clearly enjoyed in much the same way as school stories.
Dorita Fairlie Bruce wrote three series, the Dimsie, the Springdale and the Maudsley
High/St Bride’s books, each consisting of six to twelve titles. Her first book, The Senior
Prefect (1920) was later retitled Dimsie Goes to School; the Dimsie series chronicles the
career of Daphne Isabel Maitland (Dimsie) as she moves through the Jane Willard
Foundation, becomes prefect and head girl, and it then follows her into marriage and
motherhood. Bruce’s last published book, Sally’s Summer Term (1961), was part of a
trilogy and, like Oxenham’s later books, is very much poorer than her earlier work.
The books of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer have lasted much better and are still available, in
paperback editions, in the 1990s. Her first book, Gerry Goes to School, appeared in 1922,
but it was The School at the Chalet (1925) that launched her on the road to success. In
this, a young English woman, Madge Bettany, establishes a school in the Austrian
Tyrol, with her younger sister, Jo, as its first pupil. The school flourishes, evacuating to
the Channel Islands and then the English/Welsh border during the Second World War,
and returning to Switzerland afterwards. In the final book, Prefects of the Chalet School
(1970), Jo’s own daughters are senior pupils, looking forward to university and
adulthood.
Although the school story is generally thought of as being set in a boarding-school,
there were also stories about day-schools. Winifred Darch (1884–1960) concentrated on
these; her books, from Chris and Some Others (1920) to The New Girl at Graychurch
TYPES AND GENRES 349