School stories you read as DCs (Malory Towers/Chalet/Trebizon/Sweet Valley!) - fond memories plus in hindsight what impact did they have?

[ForkfulOfEasterEgg]

Inspired by this thread where some of us started reminiscing about school stories we'd read when we were younger and maybe still sometimes -reread--.

So partly a fun thread for discussing these books but I am interested in working out what messages you think you unconsciously took on from them.

The Chalet Shool series of which I was am a massive fan. It is really old - was written between ?1930 -1950 ish so I think I saw it as being part of a different era. Education for girls was seen as very important but all the female teachers were unmarried and stopped work if they married.

All the best characters were reserved the honour of marrying a doctor!

I went to a girls school so it was normal for me to think of girls being educated without boys.

Probably the Sweet Valley series had a bad impact on me. I loved reading these books - for escapism - I knew they were of no great literary value. All the slim girls/make up/impressing boys probably had a negative impact.

Did anyone's mums take a dim view of your reading material? Even if my Mum had read a Sweet Valley I don't think she'd have criticised it from a feminist point of view mainly as she is not a- feminist!

Are there any modern school story series featuring feminist messages ?

Am I the only one who loved Jennings & Derbishire? Also all the EB series (malory towers better than st clares, but also Naughtiest girl) and Trebizon. I had a few SVH books but couldn't really be doing with them - think I found them too late. Didn't get into Chalet school until later, and still only read a couple.

Thing about the Chalet School is that there is a lot of good stuff. In one of the early books Mary Burnett says she wants to be a teacher - lays out her whole life plan. One of the other girls says 'but don't you want to get married' and she says 'No. This is what I want'. (Of course in later years she does get married but the statement still stands. Joey works after marriage teaching and writing - so does Madge - also actively teaching at various points and as chair of the Chalet School company. Madge and Jem, Joey and Jack and Mollie and Dick are all shown making decisions together. The books start with Dick acknowledging that Madge will make her own way and decide her own future. The school's ethos is about equipping the girls for whatever future - marriage being one expectation amongst many but the unmarried state is in no way derided. Miss Annersley, Miss Wilson, Mademoiselle LePattre, Rosalie Dene - all happy, single women absorbed in their occupation. It is disappointing when the careers of both Julie Lucy and Daisy Venables are totally consumed by marriage (Julie apparently won't have time to be a barrister as the wife of a housemaster ) and the relentless maternity gets a bit much but overall I think you could go further and fare worse. I would far rather my girls read Chalet School than Sweet Valley for example.

No, I loved Jennings too! Was also a huge fan of Just William, in which I found Violet Elzabeth Bott as despicable as William did. I read all the Anne of GG books and had mixed feelings about them - they were my introduction to emotionally complex (ish) stories, but all that sugary girl stuff got on my nerves. Loved The Railway Children, Famous Five, Narnia and Alice: no pathetic whimpering there, though the Railway girl was a bit of a little mother, wasn't she? Like me.

I went to a girls' school and was addicted to the Four Marys, who adventurously solved murders in their free time, and of course to Beryl The Peril and Minnie The Minx I adored Wonder Woman, too, and Lady Penelope out of Thunderbirds. She had a pink sports car and shot people.

The only black character in my books & comics was an occasional guest airman in Captain Hurricane - there were no women at all in that, though lots of shooting "Sausage-eating squareheads" from an invicicible Spitfire.

So, yeah, it was adventure all the way for me! I used to read the ballet and pony stories, too, but not one has stuck in my mind :)

Good lord, Jeeves, I almost forgot the Bertie Wooster books! Shockingly remiss. There were loads of women in those - PG Wodehouse somehow managed to show a great deal more respect for them than his hero did. Wooster was mostly afraid of women, especially his Formidable Aunts

Another huge Chalet School fan here, though I only really got into them in my late teens when I started picking up second hand paperbacks. They were amazingly progressive in a lot of ways, as others have said, the idea that it was OK for women not to marry and have careers, the distinction between Germans and Nazism in the war-era books and the determined anti-sectarianism (anyone being shocked by Protestant girls attending a Catholic service is a Bad Person, for instance) and anti-snobbery - any girls who make a big deal out of class distinctions tend to come to a bad end, as well.

Mind you, anyone else into the Sue Barton books? I adored them as a preteen, had the lot then gave them away and recently have managed to re-acquire a couple.

Springlambkin, that was "Are you there God, it's me Margaret". Great book.

I think I was highly disappointed with press-on towels, after the whole belt and hook expectation!

I must be too old for Sweet Valley I think, as I have never heard of them. In addition to the Enid Blyton books of which i think I read most of as a child, I LOVED the Swallows and Amazons series. "Better drowned than duffers" - which is a bit of scary thing to wish on your kids really

In my early teenage years I loved Agatha Christie. Some great strong female characters there - no messing with Miss Marple. And Miss Lemon was always superior in intelligence to Captain Hastings.

Oh, yes, thanks for the Christie reminder, Porto :) I was always a bit intimidated by the lady detectives but there were some awfully wussy young women, weren't there? I'm starting to realise my ambition to become an awkward old lady was seeded by my early reading!

I loved the Jennings books and don't remember particularly noticing that they were boys - I could enjoy their world and relate to it. I preferred Mallory Towers to St Clares (not sure why) and loved the Chalet School books - the girls there all followed their star - it led to matrimony for many (and hordes of children), but the academic girls went to the Sorbonne, or into the careers that were then available. Home-making and motherhood were valued roles. And the worth of a character was determined by their actions, not their background (Thekla was expelled because she was proud, shinny and vile). And Elizaveta's was liked because of what sort of person she was, not because she was a princess. (and her description of Salic law was an early introduction to the unfairness of primogeniture). Girls could be pretty, but were not expected to be ornamental (St Scholastika's uniform was prettier, but derided because it was impractical). There was also a total tolerance of race and religion.

But the other strength of these books was the removal of the parent. From a young age, these girls were independent, and thinking for themselves.

Dd loves the Naughtiest Girl in the School - there the School Council made all the rules, distributed pocket money and clamped down on undesirable behaviour. All by themselves. And it was a mixed school, yet no hint that boys were superior in any way.

garlic - but many of the wussy women seemed demonstrably to be shown as foolish for being like that. No way would they have appeared as something to aspire to.

I was tragically obsessed with the Chalet School, Dimsie etc in my early teens (not sure quite why in retrospect, though I still read Antonia Forest who is an amazingly talented and sophisticated writer - glad to spot a few other fans on here too!).

There are a couple of good books by Rosemary Auchmuty called A World of Girls and A World of Women, in which she analyses the Chalet School etc and argues that actually they are quite feminist for their time, as they depict a world which is entirely focused around women. Men appear occasionally to whip out appendixes and marry the prettier teachers, but generally speaking all the crucial decisions are made by women and all the significant arguments are between women holding different points of view.

I liked Erica in the Dimsie books who wanted to be prime minister - she ends up marrying a rather drippy older man as he essentially wants a woman to tell him what to do!

Was it erode who ended up with the burns vicim? Or was that pam?

I loved the dimsie books. Also the Marlowe antonia forests.

There was a series of books (balcombe hall) by Harriet Martin that I rather liked. Think main one was called Jenny and the syndicate. Included a rather glamourous and defiant girl called Sylvia who knew how to strip an engine and who was quirky and interesting in her outlook.

Never read sweet valley. Or maybe I read one. They weren't a patch on the old'uns. Read heaps of Angela brazil because my mother collected them.

There's a very funny spoof chalet book set about 20 years after the Brent dyer ones that complrtely ridicules the premise of the originals. Joey continues to churn out girls school stories despite the Market having changed and bring dropped by the publishers. Len is divorced by reg because he has an affair with Mary-Lou and is fed up of Len having baby after baby because that was what she was conditioned to do (catholicism and no career to speak of). Margot lesbian. School not what it once was.

I also read a great book called "you're a brick Angela" which considered the themes and impacts of girls literature of the brazil/fairlie Bruce/cathedral school type. Very interesting.

I suppose what I took from the books was the sense that the male characters played a peripheral role during school days. The girls in the main had adventures and quite complex lives and relationships. But.... It all went wrong once they left school - most noticeable in dimsie grows up, where the characters are almost less interesting and sparky once afult relationships, sex and marriage get in the way. Anti-soppists marrying and slotting into traditional inescapable roles.

Not erode! ERICA. Bloody spell check! Apols for errors. On iPad.

LOVED Jennings. Also moved onto agatha christie. And Jeeves and Wooster.

I loved the Chalet School books.

Began reading them when I was 8 and still have most of the titles. I think it did influence me a lot. It was certainly progressive in that all contributions were acknowledged as valid- whether a girl chose to marry or go to university or as in a couple of occasions, enter religious orders.

Pooka: The Chalet Girls Grow Up wasn't a spoof, exactly, though a lot of diehard Chalet fans hate it - it was someone trying to work out what might have happened to the last generations of Chalet girls when the world changed. I found it fascinating, though a bit upsetting in some ways.

I've only read bits of the Chalet Girls Grow Up (in a second hand bookshop) but I remember some critical flaws in the bits I read. Firstly Joey as drawn by EBD would have kept up with trends in writing - there are a couple of references to that - saying my publishers want x,y z and she also wrote adventure and historical novels. (EBD on the other hand din't have the same range...) Secondly I think the SAN was going bust? In the later novels it's clear the San has move away from treating TB and in to the treatment of cancer. Sadly then and now a growth industry - so nobody was going to go bust and take drastic steps. Especially not a lifelong Catholic.....

The affair thing EBD had already done that with Grizel and Deira. The widowed Deira tempting Grizel's man away to marry her......what a good job Grizel met that nice errrrr doctor (for a change) on the way home.

I'm also a huge Chalet School fan - in fact I have collected the whole set, and several of the fan-fic Chalet stories too. I would have loved to go to the Chalet School as a teenager, though the thought of four days a week when all lessons and talk etc had to be in either french or german would have been a bit daunting! I have read The Chalet Girls Grow Up, and didn't like it at all - I really didn't feel like the characters would have turned out that way - it felt all wrong to me.

SpringChickenGoldBrass - I also loved the Sue Barton books, and have all 7 of them too - and wanted to be a nurse in a proper apron, though I was glad to find, when I started my nurse training, that I didn't have to learn the names of all the bones of the body, nor commit to memory the exact equipment needed for even the simplest task, lest the Nursing Tutor throw me out of the classroom. And I was a bit in love with Bill Barry too.

I dipped into Trebizon, Chalet School, St Claires, Malory Towers and Sue Barton and enjoyed them all.
yy Judy Blume - I think I read all of hers and they had excellent female characters.

I went through a pony stage and in fact some of those books (and the ones that I can still recall) were very feminist-friendly. Determined, independent-minded female protagonists who rode to the rescue on their trusty steeds. I generally preferred those to the ones based around winning at the next gymkhana.

yy Famous Five - a went through a boyish stage that lasted a year or two after getting into FF. Never wore skirts or dresses, hair cut super short, played "boy" type games etc. (the influence of the splendid George).

Loved Agatha Christie! Her female characters were a mixed bag, but there were plenty of strong ones. Tuppence was always a good foil to Tommy, for example.
I remember one interesting scenario (Evil Under The Sun??) where a vampish woman was murdered and during the unmasking of the murderers, Poirot makes the point that although everyone assumed the woman was a predatory type, in fact she tended to be the victim of men, even before her murder.
(Beautiful women weren't always the murder victims, btw - in fact, I think that type of victim in a Christie was comparatively rare. And men tended to be the murderers, although they did have female accomplices from time to time).

I think the strong female characters in my favourite books did rub off on me.

Ooh, just remembered Harriet The Spy by Louise Walsh.

Main character wanted to be a writer, her best female friend a scientist and her best male friend was obsessed with cooking.
They all detested the girly-girls and boy-boys at their school, I seem to remember...

I LOVED HArriet the Spy

Swallows and Amazons books are absolutely incomparable in their portrayal of girls IMO - not only are there more girls than boys, and the Amazons are pretty tough, but there are constant references to the importance of all the cooking, caring-type stuff that Susan is good at and how they couldn't have had half the adventures they did if it wasn't for her.
Of course Ransome was married to a pretty strong woman (Evgenia) in RL.

good point about the pony books.

God, I hated Judy Blume - all her characters spent all their time being wussy and whinging and being massively bothered about what people thought, and they were all obsessed with periods. I couldn't relate at all. The only one that was any good, as I recall, was Tiger Eyes; the main character had a bit more to her.

I def agree with whoever it was that was talking about pony books - again, they tend to be either mostly female worlds, or they feature boys who are just good chums, who the girls go hunting with or start up gymkhanas with. There's no suggestion that the boys are 'better' in any way than the girls, who all seem to be terribly self-sufficient and think nothing of rising at the crack of dawn to muck out, go hacking across several miles of countryside, then recover a lost child/save someone from a bog/discover a smugglers' cache etc etc.

Me too for Jennings. Recently republished ! Bought 3 book at Xmas as a little present to me to read to DS.