I need a Chalet School fix

[Dilbertian]

Please help:

Where can I download a Chalet School book? I'm astonished that I cannot find any as ebook.

(When you're under the weather, nothing quite hits the spot like a bit of EBD escapism.)

[MyOtherProfile]

I have just started re reading the first book. My goodness, it's bringing back memories!

[DeanElderberry]

My copy of Bride Leads (Chambers hardback with the frontispiece showing the wrecked study, but no dust jacket) is missing pages 103-106 - obviously gathered /collected wrong. This means that for many years I have had to jump from Mary-Lou preparing to read a verse from scripture, to Anne complaining about the amount of prep they have to do with no way of knowing what else happened in classes, or how it advanced the Diana story.

Such satisfaction to know at long last what I missed.



yes yes, it's all very dull and repetitive and predictable but that's why I love it

[DisplayPurposesOnly]

I didn't read these when I was younger, but have been steadily working my way through the Faded Page ones, aged 55 😁They are simultaneously hypnotic and horrific! There is no difficult girl that cannot be cured by the Chalet School, marriage to a doctor and pumping out hordes of babies to perpetuate the cycle.

Faded Page currently goes up to 32 in sequence (chalet school does it again) so I've run out now. Is the marvellous Dropbox mentioned on here still available, @Parker231? And if so what format are they? (I have an ereader, not a Kindle, so need epub or pdf.)

@BoffinMum, love your trip pics!

[Stowickthevast]

The long-running Chalet School threads on here a few years back were hilarious.

I've just reread the first book as am going to that area for Easter. I'm just trying to see if we can stay at the Kron Prinz Karl hotel which still exists.

I will try not to inadvertently fall in love with a doctor or produce multiple births while there.

[Corbally]

@Stowickthevast

The long-running Chalet School threads on here a few years back were hilarious.

I've just reread the first book as am going to that area for Easter. I'm just trying to see if we can stay at the Kron Prinz Karl hotel which still exists.

I will try not to inadvertently fall in love with a doctor or produce multiple births while there.

You’ll be ok unless you’re a fairytale princess in boating kit (in which case you snag a Baron) or just a jolly schoolgirl who regards doctors as just chums and shies away from ‘sentimental bosh’ until you have a narrow escape with some Nazis in a cave in which case you fire yourself into their arms calling them your ‘solid lump of comfort’, you total hussy. (Then you get married, start having multiple births every five minutes, and they start drugging you.)

[Stowickthevast]

Hopefully I can use my bell-like voice to call for help!

[Katiechalet]

I hope you have many coffees and cakes with lots and lots of fluffy cream on top. Do not, for any reason, speak to Frau Berlin or ask for your hair to be rinsed with Heiliges water.

[Katiechalet]

Missed this. Yes, that’s the one! Utterly insufferable. It may actually be my least favorite book, and I’m glad the finishing branch slid to the background.

[Owls912]

I was researching my family tree and found who would have been my great great aunt taught at a private girls school in the 20s and 30s and various photos of her and her pupils on trips abroad and copies of their school magazine . It was interesting comparing the characters of the mistresses and pupils from the magazines to the Chalet characters .
The books must have seemed so exotic when they were first published , it was my grandmother who started me off on them and thinking of her reading them as someone who lived in a tiny little town during the war it must have been quite exciting to read about the Tiernsee and Princesses and Thekla etc .

[Corbally]

@DeanElderberry

My copy of Bride Leads (Chambers hardback with the frontispiece showing the wrecked study, but no dust jacket) is missing pages 103-106 - obviously gathered /collected wrong. This means that for many years I have had to jump from Mary-Lou preparing to read a verse from scripture, to Anne complaining about the amount of prep they have to do with no way of knowing what else happened in classes, or how it advanced the Diana story.

Such satisfaction to know at long last what I missed.



yes yes, it's all very dull and repetitive and predictable but that's why I love it

From memory it was Hilda giving what sounds like a deeply old-school Old Testament lesson which consisted in her getting the class to take it in turns to read a sentence, correcting their mispronunciation of the names, and then getting them to close their Bibles and asking questions like ‘Name two tribes that didn’t vanquish the Canaanites’ to test their memories.

Which you wouldn’t mind, but EBD is always banging on about the CS’s zingy modern methods, like Jo making Polly Heriot make out history charts with pictures, and language immersion etc. and the Abbess is supposed to be a brilliant and stimulating teacher…

[Gremlinsateit]

@Corbally

You’ll be ok unless you’re a fairytale princess in boating kit (in which case you snag a Baron) or just a jolly schoolgirl who regards doctors as just chums and shies away from ‘sentimental bosh’ until you have a narrow escape with some Nazis in a cave in which case you fire yourself into their arms calling them your ‘solid lump of comfort’, you total hussy. (Then you get married, start having multiple births every five minutes, and they start drugging you.)

It occurred to me a while ago that Jack is probably dosing Joey with laudanum. That would certainly account for some of her behaviour in the later books!

[DeanElderberry]

That scripture lesson, reading each line and the questioning it, was going to get interesting as they progressed through Judges - Jephtha's daughter, and that bit where the concubine is gang-raped to death (seen as a bad thing) and then dismembered and the bits sent round the country (seen as a good thing as far as I could see). Admittedly Deborah, Jael and Delilah are strong and distinctive female role models, each in her own way, but it is a fairly grim read to put teenagers through, particularly in that kind of plodding and exhaustive detail.

[Corbally]

@DeanElderberry

That scripture lesson, reading each line and the questioning it, was going to get interesting as they progressed through Judges - Jephtha's daughter, and that bit where the concubine is gang-raped to death (seen as a bad thing) and then dismembered and the bits sent round the country (seen as a good thing as far as I could see). Admittedly Deborah, Jael and Delilah are strong and distinctive female role models, each in her own way, but it is a fairly grim read to put teenagers through, particularly in that kind of plodding and exhaustive detail.

Yes, exactly! Judges is horrific! From my vague memories, even the bit they’re reading was about someone (Caleb?) ‘handing over’ his daughter as a prize to some favoured warrior.

Though I suppose that’s how EBD allocated marriage to San doctors as a good conduct prize to her favourites.

[AlmostSpringclean]

i wonder if anyone has a view on Visitors for the Chalet School please? I spotted it in a charity shop thinking it was one I didn’t know about a few years back but when realised it wasn’t EBD i couldn’t bring myself to read it. Is it enjoyable?

[DuneFan]

@AlmostSpringclean

i wonder if anyone has a view on Visitors for the Chalet School please? I spotted it in a charity shop thinking it was one I didn’t know about a few years back but when realised it wasn’t EBD i couldn’t bring myself to read it. Is it enjoyable?

It's quite a nice book, very much in keeping with EBD's style. I wouldn't pay a fortune for it though.

[MermaidProject]

The thing I remember most about Bride Leads, which I've never owned, is that the Chalet school staff and pupils keep describing the new girls that join them from the other Chalet School as 'awful snobs', but then the novel keeps going on about Diana Skelton's 'common accent' and the fact that her father made his money from working his way up from a knacker's yard to running a glue factory needing to be kept quiet! It's not Diana Skelton who is being snobbish here!

[Howyoualldoworkme]

If you have Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free. I quite liked it but wouldn't pay good money for it 🙂

[DeanElderberry]

All the Brent-Dyer books are deeply snobbish - it really grated when I did a re-read a while back. Which probably demonstrated why they should be read one or two at a time, so that repetitive tropes aren't quite so obvious.

In any case, Dorita Fairlie Bruce did the 'absorbing a closed-down snobbish school' much better twenty years earlier in The New House at Springdale.

In my opinion.

[Parker231]

@DisplayPurposesOnly

I didn't read these when I was younger, but have been steadily working my way through the Faded Page ones, aged 55 😁They are simultaneously hypnotic and horrific! There is no difficult girl that cannot be cured by the Chalet School, marriage to a doctor and pumping out hordes of babies to perpetuate the cycle.

Faded Page currently goes up to 32 in sequence (chalet school does it again) so I've run out now. Is the marvellous Dropbox mentioned on here still available, @Parker231? And if so what format are they? (I have an ereader, not a Kindle, so need epub or pdf.)

@BoffinMum, love your trip pics!

I’ll check when I’m home as to whether I still have them and what format they are in.

[MermaidProject]

@DeanElderberry

All the Brent-Dyer books are deeply snobbish - it really grated when I did a re-read a while back. Which probably demonstrated why they should be read one or two at a time, so that repetitive tropes aren't quite so obvious.

In any case, Dorita Fairlie Bruce did the 'absorbing a closed-down snobbish school' much better twenty years earlier in The New House at Springdale.

In my opinion.

I haven't read that. Is it available on Faded Page or other online resources? I don't really know DFB's work at all.

My fascination with the Chalet School is kind of like picking a scab, weirdly fascinating when it shouldn't be.

I actually think the repetitiveness is part of why I find them fascinating.

Even when her plotting goes quite mad, especially in the later Swiss books (motor-boat races! kidnappings by drug gangs! Meteorites hitting the cricket pitch!) she's still hitting the same beats, time and again -- Joey the Spirit of the School and of the boundless fertility, Hilda of the melodious voice and eyes that had never yet needed glasses, trilingualism coming as an enormous surprise to all new girls, none of whose parents ever read them the prospectus, dainty cubicles and uniforms, fresh creamy milk, rest, and care for fragile girls, the San morphing from TB to apparently being some kind of world-leading general hospital, despite also being Jem's private fiefdom, lifting your eyes up to the hills etc etc).

[AlmostSpringclean]

@MermaidProject i can feel some sort of comfort just reading your description and recalling the lovely predictability of the CS world!
I lived and breathed the books in a less than ideal childhood. Oddly I can’t bring myself to re read them even I love them.

[LovesCricket]

I too Just found this thread, I've been re-reading the ones in my collection and really enjoying them! Is anyone willing to send me the kindle link please? 😊

[DisplayPurposesOnly]

@LovesCricket
www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Brent-Dyer,%20Elinor%20Mary

[LovesCricket]

@DisplayPurposesOnly Thanks. Yes I have seen the ones on Faded Pages. Am looking for the ones not there like - Coming of Age and Reunion

[Parker231]

Sorry I no longer have a copy of all the books in a Kindle format. I tidied up my hard drive before we move last year.