The Chalet School

[ShellacB]

There seem to be plenty of old Chalet School Threads, but I can't find a current one.

In the middle of a re read. I have just finished the Tyrolean and Herefordshire ones. I loved them!

I do remember the Swiss books not being quite of the same quality, so not sure whether to read them all.

Could anyone recommend the best Swiss books if I was to skim through?

Oh, I doubt anyone pressured the change, just that EBD or her editor decided when a subsequent edition was being published that Forever Amber was a more up to date ‘naughty book’. The book came out in 1944 and the film was a few years later and meant the book was widely known, whereas GWTW would have been regarded as less scandalous by the early 50s.

Nonetheless, EBD did a great sales job for both of them.

They’re certainly both a lot classier (and more demanding) novels than Flowers in the Attic, which was the naughty book doing the rounds when I was in early secondary school. And Judy Blume’s Forever! Imagine Matey flicking through a copy of Forever after she’d confiscated it!

Yes, I love that trunk-unpacking scene too —I’m always amused that EBD gives the ‘other’ Mary Katharine Gordon a yellow dress embroidered with green leaves because she gives the exact same dress to Adrienne when she starts at the CS, many years later, only Adrienne has done the embroidery herself.

At the risk of sounding ignorant, how do I find the uncut versions of the Chsllet school books please?

I love Aunt Luce. Especially her not thinking much of the pubs in Andorra.

Of all the non-parental guardians, she's my favourite.

https://www.ggbp.co.uk/ publish the uncut versions , although I think they only do small runs of an edition at the time

Or looking second hand

It's the armada ones that were cut

Some of the ones on Faded Page are uncut. Just look at the publication information at the beginning and see if it’s an Armada or an earlier edition they’ve digitised.

Yes, she’s brilliant. And not wrong about the pubs of Andorra either!

Plus I love when Katharine has to skip the bit when she’s reading the letter aloud and Aunt Luce says to say something to the Head, ‘whatever the good woman calls herself, I’m afraid I don’t remember’.

🙈 I'll post once I've read it lol

I think EBD must have been under pressure from her publishers to produce her next book when she wrote Peggy. The middles' prank - talking like characters from a Georgette Hayer novel - had been done before. There was no drama, no peril, and just a bit of bitchy behaviour from Elinuedd.

I've always put that down to Aunt Luce's unreliability 😆

There was no drama, no peril, and just a bit of bitchy behaviour from Elinuedd.

Peggy was thoroughly wet as Head Girl. She didn't even sort out the Eiluned problem herself; Joan and Dickie did that.

But that's the period EBD begins to churn them out rapidly, with two a year, three in some years (having given up her own school and become a full time writer). And she must have been marking time a bit, hoping to be able to return to Tyrol.