Is this a Mallory Towers or St Claire’s storyline?

[Remotelawfirms]

There is a poetry competition and there is a story about 2 girls each claiming to have written a poem. The first line is in fact an Emily Dickinson 1st line. The teacher knows this and asks each girl to continue from the line “there’s a certain slant of light on winter afternoons”.
the amateur poem continues rhyming “noon” with “dunes”
the Emily Dickinson poem continues about cathedral towers.

please help - I was in “slanting light” on a walk with DH and telling him how influential this story was. 40 years later and I realise how much of my life it has shaped!

Loved Trebizon. I had a crush on the version of Tish's brother (Robbie???) that lived in my head. I think the nicked poem plot might have been from the very first book.

Trabzon!!
Soo much cooler thought 11yo me than Mallory Towers etc!

That’s interesting- I remember the storyline really strongly but I would have sworn that it was an early Mallory towers. I wonder if there are two similar? Or if Ive misremembered….

Amazing! Can we see the previous page where the teacher tests them?

Yes Trebizon...my absolute favourite book set as a child!

<hits refresh>

I came on to say it was Rebecca's poem from the Trebizon series and see that many, many boarding school story aficionados have beaten me to it.

<page 120 please!>

apologies but the poet is Matthew Arnold not Emily Dixon

You're combining two stories.

Trebizon - A poem written by the main character, based on an Emily Dickinson poem, is stolen out of a bin and submitted to the school magazine by an older girl. The true author proves it's her poem because she can recite the ED poem but the older girl has never heard of it.

St Clares - A teacher tells a girl her poetry is rubbish. To test whether the teacher is a good judge of poetry, the girl submits an obscure Matthew Arnold poem as her own work in a class assignment. The teacher fails to recognise it and says it's the worst poem in the class.

The Anne-Marie tricking Miss Wilcox is from fifth formers at St Clare's, using Matthew Arnold's Despondency

A bit before

119 and 120

Miss Wilcox is a cow, who enjoys having Alison and Anne-Marie mooning after her. She entirely deserves her comeuppance.

Oh you are teasing me - we need the bit where the wise teacher challenges them both

Ah yes that’s it!

my goodness that scene has shaped my whole flipping life!

Yeah, thank you xx

I think we need to hear this story.

First Term at Trebizon (Dragon Books Paperback) https://amzn.eu/d/dIE2loE

If I'd have been Miss Wilcox I'd have held my nerve and said that just because something was written by a famous poet, it doesn't make it automatically a great poem.

I remember, Rebecca also once had greasy hair and felt a spot coming.
it was comforting to read.

no spots in Blyton!

I want to read that now.

A couple of years ago I downloaded the entire Trebizon series onto my Kindle and re-read them. They stand the test of time far better than Blyton, IMO.

There was a plot in St Clare's where the budding poet Anne-Marie submitted a Matthew Arnold poem called Despondency for her homework to prove that the teacher didn't know good poetry and would sneer at anything if she thought Anne-Marie had written it. She was right.

The girls slated her for doing it but I still think she was right.

She's a bully too. After Antoinette makes them shoe polish toast in the most contrived scene ever to get a silly practical joke into the plot, she laughs at them in front of the class about it.

Team Anne-Marie.