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!

Me too! There was one where they all decided to enter a short story competition or something, she scribbled something in about five minutes, ended up winning, and then was filled with horror that people would now be expecting great things from her.

Thanks for the inspiration... have just ordered 'First Term at Trebizon' for DD. I used to love them.

Trebizon, surely? Great books.

The Greedy Dragon! Gabrielle was bragging about something to do with Children’s Hour on the radio, so she & Midge both sent stories in. I think Gabrielle’s was accepted but Midge’s got rejected for being too scary. Then Charlotte added illustrations to it & sent it to a publisher as Miss Marjorie Charlotte Carmichael & it got accepted.

I love the Susan books, particularly the ones actually set at school. They still make me chuckle out loud.

Don’t thank me Fruitcake thank Emily Dickinson for that great first line.

I never did become someone who “knows her Emily Dickinson” beyond that line though.

Whereas because of that book, I became a huge Emily Dickinson fan, set a GCSE composition to that poem, talked about her in my UCAS statement and Cambridge interview!

Thanks Trebizon!

Ah but boasting - surely not being a Good Sport :)

Or am I Gwen being Bitter and Jealous?

A colleague, who is quite a well-known scholar of 19th American poetry and has published on Dickinson, once told me when tiddly that she owed her interest in Dickinson to Trebizon.

She knew I was a kindred spirit when I was able to recite Rebecca’s version of ‘There’s a certain slant of light’.😀

Quite so! Would it temper it slightly if I mentioned I didn't quite make my grades for Cambridge and had to slum it with some commoners at Leeds?

It would autumn, it would.

maybe all the Cambridge applicants were going “Certain slant of light” and the interviewers got sick of it :)

Something with which Enid was familiar... (and I don't mean her!)

Grayling/Theobald really knew the girls inside out, not so today. I wonder if true at time?

It was certainly true of my DC1's school (that DC is now at university, so not that long ago).

Less so of my other DC's schools.

I think Miss Keith in Kingscote is much more representative of the reality of headteachers of the time, though she had some very weird ideas when it came to choosing pupils for school teams and plays according to their virtues rather than their talents.

I always felt the teacher in the St Clare's book about the poem missed a trick. She could have just said "There's an obvious reason why that poem is obscure. This demonstrates that even supposedly great poets were capable of writing bad poems."

Miss Keith did get it right sometimes, though. She was the only one who pinpointed the real cause of the hiking incident - 'insufficient supervision' (as Karen reported). The rules for the hike said three guides - not the entire patrol, which was madness, especially as Lois was an inexperienced patrol leader. The blaming of the twins was to deflect this from Redmond, and Lois of course went along with this to avoid the blame landing on her.

Miss Keith was also quite fair over the Changear incident - allowing the girls to keep the clothes (with parental agreement) since they had paid for them. She could quite easily have sent all of them to charity, and written to parents about the rule break, but she left it to the girls to decide whether the clothes were worth a possible parental row.

She also allowed the Third Remove to do their play; she 'got it' when Tim explained they'd been given crap stalls in the bazaar due to their perceived low status.

It is interesting that AF made her a combination of fair and reasonable/utterly bonkers (as with the play casting and her view that Ginty phoning Patrick was Nicola's fault). There's a note about the netball on Keith's file but it isn't clear whether she had a say in the team selection - when Nicola is left out of the netball team, this is instigated by Lois and supported by Redmond (who has a downer on her for refusing to rejoin the guides) and Craven (who accepts their word, although later has doubts as we find out when she speaks to the visiting Rowan on the subject).

Just re-read this thread and you were all good sports!