Some schooling (DOROTHY SMITH, JOSEPHINE ELDER)

A while before the book sale brought a whole slew of new books into my life, something had inspired me to get back to a few school stories. Since I know some of you are fans of the genre, I thought I'd mention them here in brief (or as brief as I ever get). The first is by one of the lesser-known (and non-prolific) practitioners of the genre, while the others form a late trilogy from one of its best-known authors. I bet some of you are familiar with both.

DOROTHY SMITH, Those Greylands Girls (1944)

Everyone is undoubtedly sick of hearing about my Oxfam shopping on our U.K. trip last October, but despite that I have to note that this was one of my acquisitions there. Along with several other school stories and one or two family adventures, this one was added to my overloaded suitcase at the lovely Oxfam in York with its luscious bookcase full of (mostly dustjacketed) children's titles at bargain prices. And I have to also give credit where credit is due: I would almost certainly have left this one on the shelf if it hadn't been for a morsel of praise given it by Sue Sims and Hilary Clare in their Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories. Somehow, that fact stuck in my brain enough for the title to ring a bell when I came across it, and it has turned out to be one of the most entertaining school stories I've come across.

Someone at Nelson
wasn't doing their
job--Greylands is
missing its "s"

The story takes place at Greylands Orphanage, though it's a bit unclear to me what exactly "orphanage" means in the context of a school where only one girl, main character Millicent Lane, has no home to go to during the holidays. Did the word have a different meaning in those days? And if so, what meaning could it have had to differentiate it from a standard boarding-school?

The illustrations by Newton Whitaker are striking

At any rate, Greylands has a rather depressing atmosphere—the girls consider it a matter of principle to dislike the staff (i.e. the "Frightful Foursome") and to obstruct any attempt to improve morale, and therefore remain discontented and unstimulated by their studies. The stage is therefore perfectly set for a transformation tale, but this one is handled in a relatively realistic way, involving a new girl, Pamela Bellamy, who transfers from a more traditional school complete with prefects and games and house cups, and a cheerful new mistress, Miss Fraser, who determines that the surly girls will not get her down. Pamela's welcome is not a warm one, due to a false rumour that she is a relative of the Head, and Miss Fraser's is not warm because, well, because she's staff. But of course things warm up in due course.

The somewhat less realistic part of the school's transformation stems from the school's neighbor, nick-named Mrs Bluebeard, who has often complained of the girls' behavior, but who is suddenly charmed by Millicent when she comes to the rescue of some kittens in her garden. It emerges that not only does Millicent remind Mrs Bluebeard of her long-estranged son, but that Mrs Bluebeard is actually well-known to the girls for her day job. She ends up becoming quite a Lady Bountiful for the school.

If the plotlines are all predictable enough, they only occasionally enter the realm of ridiculousness, and even when they do it's all quite entertaining. What stood out for me was Smith's occasional rather biting humor. We glimpse it during this exchange between two of the staff just before the Christmas holidays:

"They're making an unholy row out there," Miss Sinclair said, after a visit to the playroom," but somehow one doesn't seem inclined to do anything about it. For one thing, I suppose it's a treat to see them looking and behaving naturally for once."

"Or else," said Miss Mercer, "their impending departure makes us view them more benignly. The fact that I shan't see or hear them for fifteen whole days makes me almost like them. What on earth should we do without holidays to look forward to, I wonder?"

And we see it again later on, when Mrs Bluebeard, already conquered by Millicent, offers a bit of "acid" sarcasm when rescuing the school play from drab costumes made from "winceyette nightgowns" (what on earth, pray tell, is winceyette?):

"This," she said, shaking out the silken folds, "was my great-grandmother's wedding dress. It's a crinoline actually, and belongs to a later period than your Quality Street. How will that do for one of your ball dresses?"

She held it out for inspection, and wide-eyed, Millicent gazed at it—a lovely blue taffeta, shot with rose, with great true-lovers' knots embroidered on the skirt.

"You're offering to lend us this gorgeous thing?" Millicent said in awestruck tones.

"No, of course not," was the acid reply. "I'm just showing it to you to reconcile you to the winceyette nightdresses."

This kind of humor only pops up occasionally, but it makes me wonder even more at Smith's real identity. Those Greylands Girls is the only book published under the name Dorothy Smith, and we've never been able to trace her real identity. Could it have been the pseudonym of an author who wrote other books? There is a bit of a polish about it that makes this not entirely implausible, but of course there are plenty of talented authors who only produce a single book. Or perhaps it's a real name, as turned out to be the case with Dorothy Evelyn Smith (who was, in keeping with her predilection for common names, née Jones, no less!). With a name so common, it is sadly likely that we'll never know her real identity, unless a child or grandchild or great-niece happens to recall hearing that her relative once wrote a girls' school story…

JOSEPHINE ELDER, Exile for Annis (1938), Cherry Tree Perch (1939), and Strangers at the Farm School (1940)

I'll bet a few of you who are fans of school stories will have read this trilogy set at the idyllic Farm School. These three books, written just on the cusp of World War II, were nearly the last children's titles written by Josephine Elder, best known for her acclaimed 1929 school story Evelyn Finds Herself (1929), widely considered a classic of the genre. In 1946, she published one final school story, Barbara at School, but then turned to writing four adult novels to supplement the two she had written in the early 1930s. I've written about her two or three times before—see here.

I've had Evelyn on my TBR shelf for ages, but something made me pick these up recently instead. I have a feeling, from what I've heard of the earlier book, that it has a bit more realism about it than the Farm School trilogy, but for the most part I found these to be great fun anyway.

The books focus mainly on Annis Best, who in the first book is transferred to the Farm School against her will following a bout of whooping cough. She is horrified to leave the games and structure of her London school for the laid-back, rule-free environment of the small school run by the large Forester family from their working farm. Annis becomes fast friends with Kitty Forester, whom she helps to draw out of her shell, and comes to enjoy the farmwork and learning the practical skills such work teaches. She learns to ride, works with Kitty to create a canoe from a giant log, and uncovers the Foresters' family secret which has threatened to keep her friendship with Kitty from developing. Of course, by the end of it all Annis decides that the Farm School is the perfect place for her after all, setting up the two sequels, in which Annis learns, with considerable difficulty, to drive a car, is made jealous of a slovenly neighbor woman who captures Kitty's affections, and, in the final volume, helps two Jewish refugees from Germany—the strangers of the title—adapt to their new lives in England.

For the most part, it's all great fun and enjoyable reading. The first book in particular is a fun school story with an enjoyable cast of characters. The other two were also quite pleasant to read, though I have to admit that at times the idealized operations of the Farm School, and the sometimes extended explanations of why everything is so perfect there, did begin to grate on my nerves. The last book, in particular, seemed to focus as much on describing the wonderful school and its policies as on the characters.

Moreover, I can't remember now who of you it was (or perhaps it was a fellow blogger) who mentioned their dislike of Elder's work, but in these books I got a glimpse of one possible reason that might be. When we first meet Annis, we learn that "[s]he disliked on sight all people who were not just like the majority of other people." Presumably, we are to believe that the Farm School has taught her that variety is indeed the spice of life, in people as well as in activities, but there remains a certain intolerance for people with less ambition or self-discipline than she has. In the first book, she and Kitty set about to reform spoiled, fat, gluttonous Peter, helping him get better at sports and become more popular, as well as slimming down and controlling his appetite. All very well, and undoubtedly we see him much happier by the book's end, but some part of me (probably the part that was a fat kid hopelessly bad at—and utterly uninterested in—sports) did cringe a bit at Annis's certainty that she knew best for him.

I also marked this passage from Cherry Tree Perch, which shows Annis's sharp edges:

Annis put Kitty and her doings right out of her head and did her weighing all over again. It came right this time. It wasn't any good letting people and the muddles they made get mixed up with your work.

In many ways, I think I quite agree with Annis here. I've always found that some folks do rather enjoy their muddles, even as they bemoan them, and ensure that the muddles go on and become ever more complicated. (Perhaps that's how some people pass the time we spend on reading?!) However, in this case, the muddled person Annis is thinking of is her best friend, and not at all the sort of person who regularly creates muddles and drags others into them, so Annis's attitude, self-protective as it is in the circumstance, didn't particularly endear her to me.

On the other hand, Elder's work remains one of the only places in early and mid-20th century fiction where one can consistently find smart, motivated, career-minded girls and women who value their education and work and professional goals as highly as men routinely do. In her adult novels, her women professionals mostly end by compromising their careers for romance and motherhood. But in her school stories—even in these idealized late books—her girls are able to eschew romance and retain their ambitions. Even if the girls are occasionally a bit prickly, I can't help loving Elder's works for that reason. If the Farm School trilogy isn't necessarily her best work, it still made for some very pleasant bedtime reading.

JOSEPHINE ELDER, Sister Anne Resigns (1932) & Doctor's Children (1954)

Josephine Elder (better known to most readers for her school stories) is anything but a literary writer when it comes to her adult fiction. She is completely matter-of-fact and no-nonsense in her approach—no fancy symbolism or gushing, poetic prose here—and her stories are basically socially-conscious melodramas. But if that sounds like the beginning of a negative review, think again, because she is also—as many readers of her school stories would attest—a stellar storyteller. It's terribly hard not to care about her characters and the often fascinating events of her novels, which offer wonderful slices of life and—particularly—insights into her characters' professional lives. That her books are not always entirely satisfying as novels ultimately takes a back seat—for me, at least—to how interesting they are in other ways.

I read my first adult novel by Elder, Lady of Letters (1949), more than a year ago, and I confess I was a bit lukewarm on it. I don't remember a lot about it, and may have to re-read it soon in light of how much I liked the second and third of her novels that I've read. Somehow I knew that her other novels were going to pay off more, and I quietly collected several of her other books for my TBR shelves. I've since read two of her girls' stories (including The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge (1926), which I reviewed here), and now I've read two more of her adult novels and enjoyed them very much indeed.

In my earlier post, I noted that one of my favorite things about Scholarship Girl was that it’s one of the only novels I know of in the early to mid-century years in which the main character is a young woman whose scholarly and career ambitions are consistently given validity over and beyond her potential for romance. When does that ever happen in middlebrow fiction? A heroine without a hero? Absurd! It might perhaps be a bit less of an anomaly in the context of a school story, where romance is more or less necessarily absent, but the heroine of Scholarship Girl is, after all, a college-aged young woman, so at the very least some fantasies of romance, even in lieu of a real live paramour, might have been expected. 

Blurb from back cover of Greyladies edition of Sister Anne Resigns

In fact, I've been trying to think of other novels of the period in which a woman's career is given such a central focus. Dorothy Whipple's High Wages comes to mind, and perhaps one or two others, but in the enormous majority of novels I recall, the heroines may sometimes have friends—or enemies—who are very concerned with their work, but they are rarely ambitious professionals themselves. And in the presentation of such supporting characters, serious career concern in a woman—serious enough to put at risk one’s chances of marrying and living happily ever after—seems generally to be a subject for criticism or outright mockery.

If I recall correctly (it's been a while), this is true, for example, of E. M. Delafield's Faster, Faster, in which the main character pushes herself beyond her limits because (the novel seems to be saying) of her over-inflated and rather self-righteous sense of her own importance. That "type" even becomes a sort of stock character in humorous fiction of the time—the tireless campaigner determined to save the world but boring everyone around her senseless with her pontifications and, usually, her socially inept personality and self-absorption. When they're taken at all seriously, they're most often dismissed as trying to be like men, or having lost touch with the real meaning of life, or else as frumpy women destined for spinsterhood, rather than as women who are ambitious and talented and capable. And these are just the women writers—it's hardly necessary to note that male authors were very often even more critical and mocking of career women.

Alas, all of this is often enough still true today…

So I found this career focus in The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge to be an irresistible change of pace. And to some extent the same focus is at the heart of Sister Anne Resigns, published six years after Scholarship Girl, and of Doctor's Children, published more than two decades after that.

As you might expect from the titles, Sister Anne Resigns deals with a young nurse, while Doctor's Children traces the experiences of a middle-aged doctor and her family. As Elder (whose real name was Olive Potter) was herself a practicing doctor at a time when relatively few women occupied such a role, the details of both characters' professional lives are fascinating and clearly drawn vividly from real life.

I found both novels to be compulsively readable, but I particularly recommend Sister Anne Resigns for those interested in the medical angle. Specifically, its strength is its portrayal of the various kinds of women who become nursing sisters, and the effects that a gruelling, rigidly disciplined profession can have on them. Some are kind, some are cruel, some are practically demented with the petty powers they wield, and some are merely absorbed by their work at the expense of social interaction. All of them are interesting, though, and they ring so true that they must have been based on Elder's own experiences. And when, for example, I was reading about Anne trying desperately to save three children, each near death from different ailments and all arriving in the ward in a matter of hours, it would have been hard for anything short of a major earthquake to distract my attention (a minor one would surely have been a mere annoyance).

Doctor's Children, on the other hand, focuses on a heroine who takes up her largely abandoned medical career again when her husband abandons her and their children. It's a bit more concerned with family life and with the difficulties of the children and a bit less concerned with Barbara's work life. But what there is of her career is particularly interesting because she reactivates her career as a doctor just as the National Health Service is being implemented. Elder offers insight into the impacts of the NHS on various of the medical professionals in the novel, and the discussions about it (largely negative) are quite interesting. I found the sections focused on Barbara's children to be less entertaining, but even there, her son's involvement with an early version of a street gang offers some insight into the delinquency that became a major social concern after World War II.

I should certainly mention that in both of these novels Elder reveals some degree of anti-Semitism—both in stereotypical portrayals of Jewish characters and in her characters' condescending or contemptuous reactions to them. It's rather odd and puzzling, since, for example, in Sister Anne Resigns, Anne becomes friends with one Jewish character (who doesn't fit her stereotypical ideas) even while being scornful of some of the Jewish women she treats in the course of her work (who apparently do fit her stereotypes). This is not any kind of dominant or prevalent theme in either novel, and there is less of it in Doctor's Children than in the earlier work, but it's something you should be aware of before reading the novels. It rather took me by surprise, since Elder is in so many ways so ahead of her time and is generally such a sensitive author, but obviously racism (as well as other –isms) has been a blind spot for many writers.

Blurb from back cover of Doctor's Children

It's also a bit frustrating for me that in these novels, unlike the earlier Scholarship Girl at Cambridge, Elder seems unable to allow her characters to continue to prioritize their careers over romance. I wonder if she was pressured by her publisher to provide "happy endings," because in neither case does the romantic plot development ring completely true, as if Elder herself couldn't relate to it. How I would have loved for her to be able to produce a novel about an unmarried professional woman like herself without such developments! But at least Elder acknowledges the complications and conflicts in her characters' decisions, and perhaps, in view of the times in which these novels were published, the characters are already radical enough just by virtue of having careers.

All but one of Elder's adult novels have been reprinted by Greyladies, though only two remain in print at the moment. Sister Anne Resigns is one of those two, however, and the other, The Encircled Heart, also about a woman doctor, is on my TBR list as well.

If Elder's novels are not always completely satisfying, they're nevertheless some of the most fascinating records I've ever come across of one area of women's experiences in the first half of the 20th century, and an area that is woefully underrepresented in other fiction of the time.

JOSEPHINE ELDER, The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge (1926)

Josephine Elder is a writer I've been meaning to get around to for quite a while now.  But despite the fact that I already had three of her Greyladies titles resting patiently on my "to read" shelves, I couldn't resist adding yet another of her titles to the collection when I went on my recent Girls Gone B[u]y-ing spree.

The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge (1926) is, according to the Girls Gone By website, considered the third book of a trilogy, after Erica Wins Through (1924) and The Scholarship Girl (1925), though as far as I can tell the first of these titles has an entirely different heroine from the other two.  I would usually start reading a trilogy at the beginning, but in this case, as I think I mentioned before, I was just too seduced by the thought of reading of a young woman's experiences at Cambridge in the 1920s to resist making a bee-line for volume three.

The novel, of course, focuses on Monica's time at Cambridge, where she is fortunately joined by her school-friend Francesca.  The story proceeds from Monica's initial ambivalence and then relief at finding herself accepted and excelling, to a bumpy patch when she determines to transform a rather self-absorbed and lazy fellow student into something more palatable to her and her friends, and on to her eventual triumph as a serious but well-liked, scholarly young woman.

It's charming right from the beginning, and I loved this evocation of Monica's arrival at Cambridge:

Monica, left to herself, explored her sitting-room. It was on the ground floor in the old wing, looking over the smooth grass of the old court to evergreens and a yellowing birch. To the left, the window of a library jutted out, and a row of little graceful arches marked a passage-way. It was a pleasant, peaceful view. Monica was glad that she was to live here, rather than in the new wings on the other side of the tower. Francesca was over there, miles away—in Top Chapel, the maid had said. Monica had only the very vaguest idea how to get there. She felt very much alone.

She left the bare sitting-room for the box of a bedroom, which opened out of it, and took off her hat and brushed her short black hair. She seemed to herself such a very different Monica from the leggy, red-tunicked girl who had galloped about Greystones and ruled it. She was grown up, a student, and must walk discreetly, and mind her manners. It was very terrifying.

It is perhaps because she is so aware of the changes that have occurred in her own personality that she decides to take on the surly, sluggish Hester, whose room is next door.  She convinces herself that Hester, disliked by all of Monica's friends, is just an earlier version of herself, and that she can be transformed into another Monica with a little bit of patience and a worthy example.

You can perhaps read into that last paragraph that I at times found this subplot a bit irritating.  Monica's friends come off as rather priggish and judgmental in regard to Hester (though they do have a point), and even Monica, who is determined to befriend Hester, does so in a somewhat condescending way.  She doesn't like Hester as she is, or offer her any real affection, but merely imagines what a glorious thing she will become when she has become more like Monica herself.  I was happy to read in Sarah Woodall's introduction that she perhaps related a bit more to Hester than to Monica (as for me, although I didn't particularly like Hester, I certainly recall being her—give or take some minor details—when I was an undergraduate), and when Monica discovers that Hester has made new friends behind her back, her reaction really challenged my liking for her:

Monica disliked them intensely. They were horrible people—lazy, self-satisfied, unwholesome people who sneered at everything that was healthy and honest and unaffected. They were bad for Hester. She must not be allowed to get too friendly with them.

Hmmm, just a bit self-righteous, perhaps?

And yet, as I continued reading (and the novel was never less than compulsively readable for me, all self-righteousness and irritation aside), I thought a bit more of about Monica's reactions and about the novel's treatment of Hester.  As Woodall notes in her intro, Elder is fair enough to allow Hester a considerable bit of redemption in the end—although it's clear she has no real affection for her—but she also allows us to see Monica's development: how the friendship, such as it is, has grown out of Monica's own insecurities and efforts to adapt to her new, disciplined, and perhaps unexpectedly successful self.  Her occasional veering toward the judgmental and intolerant may be a kind of defense.

And in the end, I was sold on Elder's story despite my early reservation. It's really a rather unique portrait of a truly serious, hard-working, and ambitious young woman, and of the sacrifices she has to make in order to succeed.  Even Monica's professor—who has undoubtedly made such sacrifices too (as Elder herself would have done, in becoming a doctor long before such an achievement was common for women)—warns her to watch out for the pitfalls of social entanglements:

'You're a good worker,' she said surprisingly. 'You'll never get shoddy—at least, not unless something extraordinary happens to you. A nice, crisp, tidy worker. Stick to your work, Miss Baxter.'

A look of alarm shot into Monica's eyes. What about the games which absorbed so much of her energy?

Miss Hepburn's steely twinkle responded. 'Oh, I don't mean you to stop your games. You must keep fit, of course. But don't get mixed up in a lot of human relationships. You'll always find them difficult. And they're the things that make people shoddy—sentimentality and all that twiddle-twaddle.'

Miss Hepburn's is possibly not a recommendation very many of us would like to follow, and yet, it might have been an essential one for a young woman seeking more than society would have expected her to have—and perhaps even more than she had ever expected for herself. 

Most remarkable of all to my mind, no charming prince appears in the end to sweep Monica off her feet and bring her to a realization that what she really wants is to be his charming wife.  Which made me realize just how astonishingly rare such stories are (perhaps even today)—stories in which women's ambitions and career pursuits are treated with genuine seriousness, and the sacrifices they require made clear.  This is true (unless I'm forgetting some) even among women authors, who more often than not have their characters flirt with careers before love transforms their lives, or else portray women who must work but are discontented about it.  In that sense, then, The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge seems well worth reading, even for those readers who aren't otherwise interested in school stories, and my irritations with it faded into background noise.  Monica might not be the most likable of all school story heroines, but she is a unique and interesting one.

Happily, the result of my compulsive collecting of Elder's novels even before I had ever read a word of her work is that I have three more of them to be getting on with—all of them, it seems, similarly concerned with professional women.  Greyladies has been working steadily over the past few years reprinting almost all of Elder's adult novels, which mostly seem to be drawn to some extent from her own experiences as a doctor, and I am now more intrigued than ever by them, and wondering how the harsh realities that Elder managed to suggest even in an entertaining "girls' story" will play out in her adult novels.

Of course, the fact that Greyladies has only reprinted "almost all" of Elder's novels does awaken my curiosity.  Only one of her adult novels has escaped reprinting so far.  What on earth could a novel by the title of Fantastic Honeymoon (1961), in the hands of a serious, career-minded woman like Elder, published seven years after her previous work and marking the end of her book publishing career, take as its subject?  Did she attempt a romantic novel late in her life?  Or a fantasy?  And what might Elder have made of such genres if she did attempt them?  I can't help but wonder.  Has anyone ever come across it?