AIBU To Think Joey Maynard (Of Chalet School Fame) Was Insufferable

[TheShellBeach]

.............with her eleven children, infuriating husband and bizarre tendency to move house (and country) to live next door to the school her sister inexplicably started when Joey was a child.

She also managed to write (at least) two books a year, have a series of multiple pregnancies and poke her nose into the Chalet School's business on a daily basis.

I’ve got to look out for that!

Reading Jo Returns and I see Miss Stewart's brother is a doctor? Who does he marry?

Tom is a second-string character after ‘Tom Tackles’, though (and EBD clearly thinks it would be inappropriate for a gruff, tomboyish character to be ‘delicate’), and I would include Cornelia in the list of characters made ‘interesting’ by an accident — when her eyes are damaged when the burning fighter pilot crashes (in Exile?)

Me too! I can understand that someone like EBD might think that, but did no editor ever tell her?

On “sisters by marriage” - I was just leafing through Island, to remind myself what Phil Craven did wrong, after reading that brilliant fanfic that someone linked in the other thread - and an adult is struggling and saying it’s very complicated to describe the relationship between Dickie and her younger stepsister. So, it’s not just a Mary-Lou thing. Weird.

Backing up a bit to Grizel and her music, I think that it was her stepmother who forced her into all the lessons.

I’d be a bit pissed off too if the only career choice open to me was to do something I hadn’t much enjoyed in the first place and which I’d been made to do by a stepmother who didn’t much like me anyway.

My sense (based on EBD’s weirdness about it) is that she was squeamish about stepsiblings because that might imply divorce rather than death having ended the previous marriages.

It makes no sense at all given she wrote "Step Sisters for Lorna".

And Grizel’s stepmother is referred to as a stepmother, not a ‘mother by marriage’ isn’t she? Doesn’t Grizel even refer to her as Steppy at some point? I wonder if step- implied something negative.

True, I hadn’t thought of that.

EBD does seem to imply that Step relations are ones you don't want, and "sisters by marriage" is more positive

Although in that FanFic where Mary Lou marries Giles, none of them can figure out why ML calls Verity her "sister-by-marriage".
They just all seem puzzled and one of them says "sisters-in-law, then?"

ARRGGHGHH No Edit button!

I mean that someone says "step-sisters, then?"

My favourite inconsistency (or perhaps change of opinion ) is EbD’s opinions on female doctors. Eustacia’s mum is a ‘doctoress’ oh horror of horrors, but a decade later daisy is encouraged to be a doctor (if only for a year before marrying)

I thought Eustacias mother was an academic doctor rather than medical?

There’s a bit at the start of Eustacia about how ‘Mrs Benson’ died because she had a cold which she ‘insisted on treating herself’ but then references to her being a ‘lady doctor’ although I’m not sure that book gets any more specific. I think one of the later ones mentions her being a brilliant doctor, though I can’t remember if that one goes into any more detail.

@PuttingDownRoots
As far as I can recall her father was the academic and she was definitely a medical doctor, Madge said she treated herself and that’s why she died.

She clearly wasn’t raised to instant obedience, or she’d have consulted another doctor.

I’m onto Shocks, and the bit where Hilda Annersley, an experienced and highly capable headmistress, is begging Jack Maynard, who admittedly has kids but has no teaching experience, to advise her on what to do about Emerence.

After which both Daisy and her creator seem to get amnesia about her having been an award-winning paediatric specialist, and start deferring meekly to her husband on some childhood ailment of their child. Grr.

Mind you, EBD appears to put Jack and Jem only slightly below God in the omnipotence line — so many instances of a CS character declaring someone will get well because Jem or Jack said so ‘And he really knows!’ (regardless of whether the unwell person has anything remotely TB-related…)

I read the "treated herself" as using some dodgy type of alternative medicine rather than the traditional. However I don't think it explicitly said that.

.................just proving that women who were doctors were nowhere near as competent as men who were doctors......................

LOLOL

On the same lines, Sir James Talbot, who was supposed to be a TB specialist (he treated Mrs. Linton) is the doctor Joey goes to consult when she has a "displaced organ".
You'd think that Jack would have made an appropriate referral for his wife and not sent a woman with a gynaecological condition to a TB specialist.

I can't remember which book that was in but the triplets were teenagers.

Mind you, I'm not surprised Joey has a displaced organ after all the pregnancies she had.

‘It isn’t cheek, it’s just Mary-Lou’ could be a drinking game in itself.

Mary-Lousplaining would drive anyone to drink.

I'd forgotten about Joeys displaced organ! Must have been a prolapse, right??!

I can’t imagine how else an organ could be displaced.

Not without some sort of hideous accident, anyway.