To wonder why MNHQ still haven't given us our Chalet School topic?

[TheObligatoryNotQuiteSoNewGirl]

Because we probably shouldn't still be hanging out in AIBU, four (or is it five?) threads later.

I've been reading all the lovely transcripts, and although I started Prefects yesterday, I don't want to finish it, because it's the last one! :-(

Marie Claire then disappears for two books without a mention (even when at one point there is a list of the small children in the nursery), then re-appears with no explanation of what they did with her. Of course this is when Phil has something followed by Polio (presumably over the summer holidays).

I think the publilshers should have pulled the plug on the series after the first few Swiss books. They must have realised the books were becoming increasingly dull, repetitive and ridiculous.

I think they did want to end it after Gay From China, hence the four year gap between it and Three Go...

But I think EBD agreed to make some changes and the series carried on.

I think that is what confused me Mummytime. I read two books after the missing summer term with no mention of Claire, and then suddenly she appears in the nursery.

So is the Phil polio story not in Summer term? I thought I musthave missed it there.

I do like some of the island stories Vintage which we would have lost had she ended it at Gay. But the last few have been a struggle, am pretty sure the furthest I got as a child was Ruey Richardson.

Has anyone got electronic copies of Jo Of and Princess you could send me? I can't open the format which is on the onedrive and I am sadly missing Oberammergau and my own kidnapping. Thank you!

I agree Gay from China would have been a premature end. And we'd never have met OOAOML .
I think Changes for the Chalet School, with the school packing up for their move to Switzerland would have been the right place to finish it. Although then, of course, we would not have had the pleasure of Joan Baker's company.

Elisaveta PM me your email and I will? They are only the copies from Onedrive though so not sure if this will help, but happy to try.

Vintage that's an interesting thought, I wonder which changes the publishers wanted/EBD was trying to make? For me there is a very definite change after Gay - I can't quite put my finger on what exactly shifts at this point, but I love almost all the books up to this point and have only minimal enthusiasm thereafter.

Toni did they find any to-all-appearances-dead mannequins in the water my lamb?

The disposable nature of these adopted children (and how very EBD, that it's Joey's place to decree who is and isn't a suitable parent) kind of underlines how false Jo's 'perfect mother' thing is, for me. I'm sure Madge never randomly loses other people's children.

Oh, and another vote for the loveliness of Daisy and Robin, separately but also especially the sisterly relationship they have in Armishire. It is really lovely.

Surprisingly, in an article I read, the ability to write out characters like Robin and Daisy in Three Go, as they had now grown up and left school, was seen as a positive by the reviewer as it allowed new fresh characters to be introduced.
I can see how moving on from Lavendar, Gay, Jacynth etc was probably a good thing as it allowed the Lucys to move more centre stage and introduced Mary Lou (who was quite appealing to begin with), Clem and Verity Ann.

But Robin and Daisy left a big gap in my opinion, and Mary Lou just never had their charm and charisma.

Hmmm. Part of me thinks Gay would be a perfectly sensible point to end it, but if she had, I know I'd be wishing there was more. Changes likewise makes sense, but I'd probably still be wishing for more, and I'd also be v aware of the post Gay decline in quality. I could definitely live without OOAO!

If I didn't have loads of work to do, I think I'd sit and make a list of all the character change which happens around about Three Go - when is Robin effectively written out? Daisy? Madge? It's only a few books along til Nell is shunted off to Welsen... It's like when a new producer starts at a soap and culls half the cast. Only, who does she introduce at this point? Of the 'three', only ML remains a major character - Clem is all but written out immediately and Verity merges into a rather nondescript 'gang' (who can never be a "quintette" or whatever because they are so ill-defined?). The only notable new mistress I can think of (long) after this point is Kathy Ferrars - am I being unfair? Is Ruth Derwent or anyone else significant? And it feels as though all the other new schoolgirl characters are one-book wonders, background nobodies, or endless Bettanys etc. No wonder she thinks Joey has to be ever-present...

It would be interesting to know more about what the publishers wanted. I wonder if the Helen McClelland biog sheds any light.

It would also be interesting to get a sense of the sales figures during the series' lifetime!

Ha, cross posts Vintage.

In theory, I suppose getting rid of Daisy and Robin (and Gay, Jacynth and Gill Culver, all of whom I really like apart from the bit in Mystery when the cook has had some horrific accident and Gay can only laugh and say she wished she'd seen it ) might be a great opportunity, and by this point space for Old Girls is becoming rather limited. But she just doesn't make much of it, does she. It's as though she'd run out of ideas.

I agree, apart from Mary Lou it's hard to think of any other characters after the Amishire years who makes much of an impact. Even characters like Carola Johnstone and Katharine Gordon only really make their presence strongly felt in their first book and then just melt into the background a bit. And, as has been said often on here, the up and coming Bettanys/Russells/Maynards really aren't particularly strong or interesting characters, with the possible exception of Bride.

Maybe if EBD had written fewer Island and Swiss books and concentrated more on character development and consistency the later books would have been better. She seemed to be just churning them out in the end: several chapters of a new girl being told the rules and regulations and descriptions of the dorms, splashery, speisesaal etc; Joey inviting them over for tea and showing off the latest baby; some excursion that goes badly wrong; and a long boring description of a Sale or pantomime. Then just some kind of weak or unbelievable storyline sandwiched in between.

I bet the sales figures must have been pretty strong in the Swiss years - surely complacency is the only reason she would have been able to keep churning out books of declining quality at such a rate? Though, that said, I've suddenly remembered a lot of the later books are the most expensive in hardback, which rather suggests there were fewer in circulation.

One oddity I'm a bit confused by is New, which I'm fairly sure came after the series was supposed to finish at Jo Returns. If I were trying to persuade my publisher to keep going, I'm not sure that's the book I would write - I quite like it, but it's darker than most of the ones preceding it, it's disjointed, and it doesn't really seem to resolve the 'what to do with Jo as an adult' question - she's still just hanging around, getting in the way, spoiling what would otherwise have been a much nicer Nell/Con scene etc etc. I get how Exile bought her a new lease of life, and I think it's very cleverly done, but New rather confounds me.

V interested to hear if anyone would recommend the McClelland bio, btw. Though I must not must not buy it until my MSc is finished, no matter what.

Maybe she was just profoundly disillusioned by this point: her own school had failed to replicate the success of the CS (unsurprisingly, but I think by quite some distance) and she was middle-aged, unmarried (reserving judgment about whether she was unhappy with this, but I'm sure I've read it suggested she was) and still supporting her mother. Maybe she was going for quantity over quality because she knew she couldn't manage the quality of old any more... And maybe she wanted to earn as much as she could from writing, because she didn't want to teach any more.

It's at some point later on when she goes back in time to write Tom, Rosalie and Mystery, isn't it? As parts of various Chalet Books or whatever they were called - also a cynical commercial enterprise, but, not knowing the rest of their content, I wonder if she also knew then that she was harking back to her glory days in those out-of-sequence stories...

From an artistic point of view I'd have knocked the series on the head around Coming of Age, since I'd be sorry to lose Problem and New Mistress. After that I think they're pretty much all dross.

Hmm - might have to reread New to see what I think of it in the light of your comments, Nell...

Shit, I must get offline and do some work.

Final thoughts, though - I wonder if she also finds herself a bit tied up in too many accidental foregone conclusions: there's not a lot of scope for non-Bettany head girls (which also means those characters have to be socially central to their forms, to justify this - by the way have I already whined about the rubbish bit in Bride where Miss Annersley says she passed Bride over for HG because she didn't want to look like favouritism? Spineless jellyfish!), there's no scope for meaningful internal staff promotion, the school can't really expand any further in size or in curriculum. And I'm sure she always had in her mind to move them back to Austria, which imposes another set of constraints in some ways and also creates a distraction in the meantime.

See, Irene, I also wouldn't want to lose Reunion. But that would mean keeping in almost all of the dross.

I used to love the interminable descriptions of the dormies (dainty...cretonne...rose-splattered curtains...matching rug...) when I was a child. I even drew diagrams of them ; they sounded so cosy.

Now I tend to skip through them; how many times do I need to know about pegs for frocks, shelves for Sunday hats, and a handy space for one's brush and comb (that were - apparently - in a bag already FFS; how obsessive did Matey have to be??)

"I've suddenly remembered a lot of the later books are the most expensive in hardback, which rather suggests there were fewer in circulation."

Not necessarily; I think most of us who own hardbacks of the earlier ones own reprints rather than first editions. Remember, children's paperbacks didn't exist until Puffin invented them in the late 1940s/50s, so there was a much bigger market for the hbs until then than there was in the 1950s/60s, when most people would have probably waited for the paperback. (Was Armada always the only pb publisher of the CS, and did they make cuts right from the beginning?)

I imagine that the failure of EBD's school was directly due to the 1944 Education Act (can't remember if I posted about this before or just meant to), which effectively wrecked the market for small 'amateur' private schools.

Gay from China is interesting about the wider school market as seen through Miss Bubb... one of the themes of the book is differentiating the CS from its competitors, private high schools like the one in A Head Girl's Difficulties, many of which presumably turned into free grammar schools post-1944.

Totally agree about the mix up In Althea I thought it was just me.

My favourite character is actually Madge. She's nice and believable but why is she not invited to the reunion.

I think Joey was a bitch not to invite her.

Hate the way Daisy just becomes a baby machine after getting married and giving up her career but I suppose that might have been true to the times then.

She had definatly isn't the plot by Adrienne as that whole book is ridiculous.

The early ones have lovely descriptions in them of Austrian scenery and Christmas.

I love the war books even though rationing never seems to hit the Cs.

Irene that's really interesting and I wonder if Miss Bubb embodies what EBD saw in the more structured accountable way education was going then.

She mentions the Bubb has no time for music/art/domesticskills or PE.

Having a swipe maybe.

Ah Irene it didn't occur to me at all that the later HBs would have very soon been out in PB, with no/fewer HB reprints. In that case, I'm going to go back to my suspicion that loyal CS readers continued to buy the crappy Swiss books in high numbers, hoping each time that there was a return to the CS of old.

That is v interesting, fitting it all in with the 1944 Act.

I love Madge, too, although I think she's ruined by Reunion. (Though she should have been invited, of course - but Joey is clearly glad to have her out of the way, because how can she be Most Important First Pupil, Most Important Founder's Sister, Most Motherly Mother, when Madge the actual founder and the original mother-of-the-masses is still there?)

I'm not sure it's inconceivable that Daisy could have combined motherhood and working as a doctor, actually. (Happy to be corrected on this as really I have no idea.) Maybe less common than giving up her job, but not so impossible it couldn't have been written that way if EBD had wanted. Missed opportunity. :(

Also, totally unrelated: Why does Mlle Lachenais have no personality, other than coffee-making? Is it because she's French? (See also the woefully under-characterised Thérèse Lepattre and Julie Berné.)

That's what I think, thebody - EBD definitely majors on how much better the CS is in terms of all-round education, music, physical fitness etc than yer average high school exam factory. She also makes a big deal about how the CS prioritises the girls' health, especially important as so many of them are Delicate.

No wonder so few of them end up with interesting careers, the cynic might comment.

Oh and there's also a bit in Gay where one of the characters (Bill?) comments that many of their pupils won't need to earn their own living, hence implicitly suggesting that advanced maths or whatever would be a waste of time for them.