To ask all Chaletians to get ready for Madame's birthday?

[LonnyVonnyWilsonFrickett]

Pop to the splasheries my lambs and after you've brushed your hair till it shines we'll have a quick practice of 'I sing of Margaret so fair'.

Once we've finished casting the movie, that is....

Actually you're probably right about Nell and Con NellWilson. EBD was probably describing a relationship she'd witnessed without really realising the nature of the relationship in question.

Or a relationship she'd had without wanting to be explicit?

IIRC Jem or Madge had warned Sybil about playing with the kettle which is why they were so annoyed with her.

By "Three", Sybil is nearly 14 and Josette is nearly 10 so has aged twice as quickly as Sybil, impressive.

Do I have an innocent mind? I haven't noticed the relationship between Nell Wilson and Con Stewart. Didn't Con go off to get married to a McKenzie in Australia (and then sent them Emerence)?

Yes but Nell luffed Con, and in Gay in China she tells Joey all about it. Tis vair touching.

The 'middle tranche' of books, ie the Welsh ones are really growing on me I have to say.

The Welsh ones are far and away the best imho. I particularly love The Chalet School Goes To It with all the details of wartime Britain - the girls digging for victory (while sneakily trying out lipstick and snazzy headscarves) the blackout, the hasty wartime wedding with borrowed veil and pooled rations really give a lovely insight to life during those difficult early days of the war.

Or a relationship she'd had without wanting to be explicit? - Yes, I think this is also a strong possibility. (My speculation on this one, then, is that this possibly-unwise inclusion is about publicly voicing a resentment - which would tie in very nicely with one woman eventually marrying - by no means an unusual lesbian experience at that time.)

It's Hilda that Nell says she loves in Gay from China - it is a v touching passage - she's talking about the accident and how close it had been for Hilda, she says something like "if she'd died, I would have gone on I suppose, but I would always have felt as though part of me had died too".
That said, personally I like to read theirs as a lesbian relationship, but I can also v much appreciate a platonic reading of it - it's a strong and significant friendship. I can't see the same platonic reading of Nell and Con, who do nothing but skip hand-in-hand giggling through corridors, bicker about golf, find ways to spend the night together - there is an underlying something to their interactions, IMO.

I like the Welsh ones best I think. It is a close thing between those and the Tirolean ones, but I like them in such different ways it's hard to truly compare.

Once the school moved to the Island they lost a lot of their sense of place and time and started to turn into fairly typical school stories. And the Switzerland ones completed that process.
I think the series could really have ended with All Change for the Chalet School (although then, of course, we'd never have met the legendary Joan Baker).

It feels to me as though she does a real U turn in the Swiss books - she goes from being quite character-driven to being very plot-driven: even aside from the insistent morality to most of these (repetitive) plots, it just feels like a loss because she uses a character for a certain plot and then just drops them into the amorphous mass of schoolgirls. I wonder if it's that she ran out of ideas? Or that she was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the growing Bettany clan and, even with the boys shut out from age four onwards, couldn't really do them justice, never mind bring in any focal previously-unrelated characters in a sustained way?

I'm sure I've read somewhere (possibly even on this thread...) that before Exile she had basically completed the series as the publishers perceived it, so had had to up her game in order to keep writing it - in this sense the Anschluss was both inconvenience and great opportunity to her, and I do think the way she worked huge political events and Jo's growing-up together was impressive and v successful. Going on from this, I wonder if there was a level of complacency, from both EBD and her publishers, that through the 1950s-60s she could just churn them out. I love some of the bonkersness of the Swiss books, but they do feel incredibly churned out.

Also, I think the Swiss ones suffer a lot from the contortions she goes through in order to sustain Jo's central role - I think a lot of the time-related issues can be explained by a desire to keep the triplets in the school for as long as possible, I think the writing-out of Madge is a big loss but can appreciate the difficulty in suggesting that both sisters continue to follow the school around Europe, I think often 'what role to Jo?' has been a primary consideration in the later plots.
But I also think, this is an easy criticism for me to make: what would the later CS books have looked like if she had been brave enough to throw Jo out? Does the series lose continuity? Does it become equally formulaic anyway? Had the whole idea just run its course and I'm focusing unfairly on Jo because she is profoundly annoying as an adult?

And, ultimately, although they are not on a par with the early or middle books, I wouldn't wish to not have read the Swiss ones.

Agree Nell I read somewhere that most series were 12 books at most

Mallory Towers was just 6, so the publisher thought she had finished after that.

I hadn't read the war ones pre-transcripts and have really enjoyed them.

I wonder was she experimenting with phasing Joey out when she had her decamp to Canada for a while?
I actually think Joey could have worked really well if there'd been less focus on giving her this ginormous family and having her behave like an eternal schoolgirl.
The idea of her living close to the school because of Jack's job is plausible. And having her take an ongoing interest in it's goings on because of her sister being the founder is also believable. But EBD just went too far with it and turned Joey into this Peter Pan character who still managed to have loads of children and become a famous author and be constantly consulted by the staff in relation to confidential pupil issues. If EBD could have restrained herself a bit and had Joey as a mother of 3 or 4 who remained involved with the school in an adult way (and later as a mother of some of its pupils) she could have continued to grow and evolve as a character. But instead she became stuck in a time warp and even her childbearing was turned into a kind of schoolgirlish competition to win at having the biggest family.

Yes, that's all very true. It seems kind of jarring that she treats her most beloved character in such a way - she becomes really too simply drawn, not just because she can't ever be in the wrong, but because she is reduced to this 'eternal schoolgirl popping out umpteen babies' caricature.

I sometimes wonder whether the introduction of Mary-Lou was supposed to alleviate this perceived pressure on (the character of) Jo to fulfil so many roles - it could have been a good opportunity for her treatment of Jo's character to evolve more fully without losing the 'precocious, popular, outspoken but upstanding' type of character from the series altogether. But it's as though she can't bear to shift from Jo as the spirit of the school.

I agree. I also think her constant dwelling on Joey as the forever schoolgirl led to her neglecting to really develop the younger members of the family, who could have believably become slightly Joey like figures.

Instead we have Joey as this irritating overgrown schoolgirl on the one hand, and a whole gaggle of wishy washy, dull daughters and nieces on the other.

Completely agree. She's just turned up at St Briavels to teach two mornings a week. I mean, come on EBD. Give it a rest!

I'm finding Oberland a bit um... feels like I saw the film last week and know whodunnit? Can't work out why!

I quite like Oberland - not just because it has lots of Bill, although I suppose that's a factor.

Lonny, you sound v ungrateful! Joey is saving the day, don't you know.

I think I read somewhere (maybe even in my GGBP copy of Three Go) that Three Go To The Chalet School was written as a kind of 'reboot' as the publishers thought the series needed a new focus after the war years. It must have sold well and there must have come a point that EBD, like a few contemporary authors I can think of, just got popular enough to be allowed to write whatever she liked.

(I always that that possibly the single most 'fuck you!' bit in Chalet Girls Grow Up is when Joey is dropped by her publishers...)

I like the bit in Lavender where Joey gets it wrong. Where Lilamanis mother has died so Joey thinks it will be better for Lilamani to be with Joey in her happy home and being constantly reminded of what she is missing and it is Madge who says send her back to school.

I haven't read CGGU, but from the various précis I've read of it, the idea that Joey is actually mad in her interfering with the school and refusal to 'grow up' doesn't sound to me at all far from canon. Is that a fair assessment?
Btw, I've been meaning to ask about fill-ins. I've no interest at all in reading CGGU, but of the less controversial books, are there any that people would recommend/avoid?

I think Joey is the wife/mother EDB really fantasised about being while the character of Bill is really who she is.

She doesn't seem to really know men.

If you look at her male characters they are all the same. Strong, upright, clever, hardworking and honest. Oh and of course good at maths as that's a boy thing.

Her female characters are far more complex.

I don't know. I can't make up my mind if EDB was a lesbian or alternatively craving for a man. Pehaps both.

I'd put my money on both.

Re: fantasy characters: I think it's an interesting point. I think Jo is v much someone EBD aspired to be. But I also think you can read Bill and/or Miss Annersley to be the teachers (and possibly also people) she aspired to be. I think it must have been very odd to continue writing school stories after the failure of her own school - I'd find that quite hard, I think.

Before reading these threads, it actually hadn't occurred to me how absent and poorly developed all of her male characters are. I think there's a couple of 'types' of man (I don't think the eccentric intensity of eg Plato and Herr Anserl is the same as the boring-boring bossy mansplaining of Drs Jem, Jack, etc etc etc) but they are limited and sidelined. The CS fails the inverted Bechdel test.

There's something very childlike about EBD's writing. Just going back to Peggy - she's exactly the type of girl a primary school child would have admired in the 40s/50s (and even in the 70s when I was growing up). Dainty, pretty, tidy and well behaved. In a RL secondary school she would have driven people mad or bored them stiff but in EBD's Chalet School she was a person to aspire to be, and a wonderful head girl.

Likewise the men Joey and Madge marry are manly and reassuring, but the kind of men little girls think of when they say 'I'm going to marry daddy when I grow up'.

And of course, all the fairy tale falling in love and getting engaged after a few weeks' acquaintance and then having lots and lots of children and living happily ever after. Pure Hans Anderson.

Do you think that's due to EBD's own preferences/childlikeness, or a sense of 'duty' to her readers, knowing they would largely have been a good bit younger than the characters involved?

As for the courtship, what would have been 'normal' for girls of that era? (Obviously 'that era' spans quite some years, though you probably wouldn't think it to read the later books. )

I think a lot of it is innate to EBD. If you read the Malory Tower or St Clare books they manage to make the central and popular characters naughty, untidy, mischievous or whatever. In fact, the pretty and sweet characters are often presented as feather heads (another issue maybe?) but the Chalet School, which is actually aimed at a slightly older age group does have some very fairy tale type elements to it.

Also EBD seems to become overly engaged with some of her characters which affects her ability to give them flaws and faults and allow them to have lives away from the Chalet School.

I think it's more that EBD had really no idea what a male-female relationship should look like. Her own family background was pretty fractured - didn't her father run out on them to live with a second family, or something? Her brother died quite young and I don't think she can have known many men at all. If she was indeed a lesbian then she wouldn't have had much cause for wanting to meet/relate to men either.

The one relationship she manages reasonably well is Janie and Julian in Janie of La Rochelle, and there's very little romance in it - just what EBD herself would call good-fellowship. I do rather think a lot of that book was cribbed from Anne's House of Dreams, though. If anyone has read Jean of Storms, when she was actually trying to write an adult relationship, it is clear that she doesn't really know what she's doing. The girl friendships she depicts in it are much stronger and more realistic, at least until she throws in a love interest for the best friend as well.

Miss Annersley definitely becomes EBD's alter-ego in the later books - suddenly she's the one whose feelings you are immersed in. She feels sick or faint when she realises the risks the girls have been running, and she becomes the romantic figure to some extent also (see Redheads, for example). I don't really understand why Bill gets shunted off to St Mildred's, because I love the Hilda/Nell relationship. 90% of Hilda's interactions after that are with Rosalie Dene, who isn't at all an equal to her.