Just re-read Ballet Shoes as an adult

[heron98]

Someone answer me this - if they are so poor they can't even afford new clothes, why don't they get rid of the flipping cook and the maid? Why doesn't Garnie get a job instead of staying up all night stressing about money?

Goudge, sorry.

I wouldn't get worried about a message that it's okay to treat someone so badly and just sit in the kitchen sink writing.

I don't think DS is that didactic. My point is that, even though the novel is a sort of light-hearted, nostalgic fantasy rewrite of Jane Austen, with two impoverished, marriageable sisters with embarrassing/inept parent figures, looking to make their way in the world, it's pretty reactionary in terms of the rigidity of social class.

Not just in terms of Stephen's labour being taken for granted, but the terms on which the impoverished but genteel Mortmains are on visiting terms with the inheritors of Scoatney Hall while a girl Cassandra knows from the village is at the first dinner but as extra staff rather than a guest. The village schoolmistress (whose non-U speech is indicated) and the solicitor's clerk are condescended to by Cassandra throughout. Ditto the way that Ivy from Four Stones Farm is seen as an appropriate girlfriend for Stephen, and the way in which she is described as good-looking but in a definitely lower-class way.

I'm not suggesting Dodie Smith was consciously doing this, any more than Enid Blyton was when she divided working class characters into good (deferential providers of cream teas, colourful semi-feral children who act as guides, 'simple' shepherds) and bad (criminals, foreigners, local bobbies who don't defer to the commanding Julian), but it's there and uninterrogated all the same under the delightful fantasy.

Whereas Noel Streatfeild's The Circus is Coming (which is one of my favourites, despite being a rather grim novel in lots of ways) completely deconstructs class hierarchies. The initially snobbish children grow up believing they are impoverished but upper-class, and discover when they go to live with the circus that the aunt who brought them up like that was a former lady's maid to an aristocratic family, and they are in fact descended from that family's cook and groom, rather than cousins of the family itself.

The Circus is Coming is my favourite NS. I read it quite young, when I was used to Enid Blyton-y or A Little Princes-y denouements, when a parent-replacement steps in and saves the day at the end, so 9 year old me was quite shocked that all the adult figures in TCiC are very flawed/ don't particularly warm to the children ever/ are pleasant but distant, or, if they are engaged with the children, it's primarily because they show promise in circus work.

It's the focus on children's work in showbusiness/skating/circus/music that is so interesting in NS, especially as Peter and Santa aren't insanely gifted, the way heroes and heroines are in other children's novels.

I also have a vague recollection of one where a tiny child is 'married' to a little boy, and years later everyone has forgotten about it, and they are trying to marry her off again

STDG, we're going back a few pages here, but is that The Marriage of Meggotta (Edith Pargetter/Ellis Peters)?

I loathe Goudge's magical realism and the talking animals, which seem twee, whereas I don't find that with Narnia. I wonder why. . I'm just about prepared to wear it in A Little White Horse, but can't abide Smokey House ( sorry). So I like island Magic, Green Dolphin Country, City of Bells, The White Witch and esp The Dean's Watch. Castle on the Hill has a few good bits ( Miss Brown's first dinner) , ditto scent of water, Damerosehay doesn't do it for me although i read them from time to time, and The Rosemary Tree has one if her few evil characters other than the witch in The White Witch. I like bits of Gentian Hill, not v much of The Middle Window. She does unrequited love quite well. But quite an interesting person. Her mother sounds tough..

I'm also a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan.

And Understood Betsy. Which I've only just read.

And The Cuckoo Clock. That's magical realism again but somehow ok.

Does anyone else like Gillian Avery? I adored The Warden's niece and took up Greek on the strength of it ( unfortunately I was No Good). The scene if her crawling under the desks at the Bodleian is one if my all time faves.

Oh, I loved The Warden's Niece and had completely forgotten about it until you mentioned it!

Gillian Avery is great. (I did O-level Ancient Greek) Plenty others by her. 'A Likely Lad' set in Manchester is one of my favourites.

Not really sure how dreadful the class thing is in 'I Capture the Castle.' Cassandra is still fairly young at the end of the book. The snobbier Rose goes and marries Neil and ends up in whatever the equivalent of T-shirt and jeans working with him on the ranch.

It's Stephen's mother who told him to know his place with the gentry. (He's going to end up richer than any of the Mortmains.)

And it's sort of about the decline of the English class system - the end of that way of life. American money is needed to keep the castle going.

I have never managed to read a Damerosehay book. How do you pronounce it? Dame Rose Hay, or Dammer Osehay?

Tricky, I never quite worked that out. I started with Dammer but have now moved onto Dame.

Mariannesolong( love the name), I think that was her husband's father's story, iirc. Something like that. I remember him lecturing at one if the v few lectures I went to.

Oh, and Tricky, I decided the h was silent. As in Jose.

Thanks, Orlanda, yes I think I do silent h too when I say it in my head.

No mention of Violet Needham's books yet. Any fans?

Wonderful thread. I shall be paying a visit to AbeBooks shortly!

By the way if there are any fellow Antonia Forest fans on here (which I'm sure there are), Girls Gone By is currently reissuing all the non school stories. The Marlows & the Traitor and Falconers Lure are available at the moment.

Oh I love Violet Needham, especially The Black Riders and The Stormy Petrel. When I first read The Black Riders aged 7 or 8 I was used to characters in books being basically good or basically bad, and the switch in The Black Riders when the seeming evil tyrant Count Jasper turns our to be much more complicated than that really blew my mind.

Oooh, Falconer's lure, my birthday is shortly after Christmas... guess what..
I haven't read the players boy ones.

Also Geoffrey Trease Crown of Violet...and Henry Treece whom I didn't like quite so much..

And then horses. the Pullein-Thompsons and Mary O'Hara, My Friend Flicka. Anyone?

The Player's Boy books are completely brilliant, Orlanda, if you can cope with a Christopher Marlowe who is kind of an Elizabethan male Tim Keith and a Shakespeare who bears an uncanny resemblance to Rowan Marlow. Nicolas is pretty much Nicola.

I've not read the Player's Boy books, Tooth, but the idea of Christopher Marlowe as a Tudor Tim Keith has sold me on them!

Actually, that not entirely right - Edmund Shakespeare, Will's baby brother, is also a bit of a Tim, that kind of charismatic, disconcerting frenemy side of her. AF does that very well, I always think.

Scrubbed Pine, interesting thoughts about Casandra and how she treats people in I Capture The Castle.
I'm not sure the comments were totally unwitting and just portraying underlying values about class at the time. It's a story about a young girl coming of age and awareness. In some ways she becomes quite adult and in others remains very young. I took one of the signs of her being very young to be the way she thinks about and condescends towards Stephen and some of the villagers. I think Dodie Smith has her making ignorant comments.....because she is young and ignorant. That is one of the points of the story.

Anyway, although I don't see this particular book as just unwittingly showing prejudice without thinking about it, I actually don't have a problem with books that do. I see books as being of their time and reflecting the values and attitudes of their time through their characters. I don't feel authors have a duty to deconstruct social norms or to challenge morality necessarily. Sometimes, by showing views that we feel uncomfortable with or abhor, they can help us understand why people felt or still feel that way - we might not feel it ourself, but it all adds to our understanding of human beings and the lives they lead/lived......which in my mind is quite simply one of the amazing things books do....as well as transporting us to other places, they show us stuff about ourselves or the human race, which we might not have known before, or at least might not have quite articulated even in our own heads. The books articulate it for us.

Irene, yes, Count Jasper is a very satisfactory converted vilain. Have you read 'The Woods of Windri' ? Possibly my favourite.

Given her username, OrlandaFuriosa should be asking for 'The House of the Paladin' for her birthday.

Yes, I love The Woods of Windri! Though I was a bit disappointed in The Changeling of Monte Lucio when I reread it recently.

Orlando- I was a big fan of Ruby Ferguson's horsey 'Jill' series. I loved Elizabeth Goudge as a teenager and still retreat to her books now when I need comfort reading. She really overused the word 'silver'. I particularly like 'The Dean's Watch'. reading through the list I can see there are a couple of hers I haven't read.

Looking forward to my post arriving over the next week or so. This thread has cost me a bit!

Ooh, I've just looked it up. A cross between The Orisoner I feel Zelda Rupert if Hentzau, the lost prince and the scarlet Pimpernel. Irresistible.

Another Jenny Overton, The Ship from Simnel St, anyone read it?

Looked up Esmond Romilly. It seems to be a canard that he was WC's son, but he was certainly a cousin, possibly double cousins with JM.

• prisoner of Zenda. .. trying to deal with hyper jrt and predictive text is bound to fail.

Catherine Storr - Marianne Dreams, The Chinese Egg, and the younger Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf.

Yes, Sally's Family, lovely, also A Coronet for Cathie.

And Nesbit's The Magic City. (Amused me that the dachshunds were somehow illustrated as Dalmatians) and Harding's Luck.

Loved many of William Mayne's books, especially Summer Visitors. Was gobsmacked...