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Angela Brazil

 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:18 / 15.08.02
My parents just came back from the Isle of Wight to present me with none other than 'For the Sake of the School' and 'A Fourth Form Friendship' by Angela Brazil. Poor old Banana Yoshimoto's been put aside for more important stories! Any thoughts on these little gems?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
07:29 / 16.08.02
Well, you know I do (love schoolgirl stories, that is)... I think of Angela Brazil as the ur-school-story-writer, really. While I am working this morning I will think out a complex schema within which we can put her in her proper place, and post it at lunchtime... but I think that even more than most other school-story writers, Angela Brazil creates a world populated entirely by girls, in which man has absolutely no part to play. The slang is great too...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:38 / 16.08.02
Are they the nice old hardbacks, btw? I love those...

And I didn't know whether you might have seen this before, but I think it's great: Virtual World of Girls - someone's thesis online, basically.

I think it's a bit peculiar that Angela Brazil doesn't really attract the type of hard-core fans that Elsie J Oxenham and Elinor M Brent-Dyer do - I think part of that must be because she wrote one-offs rather than series, but I suspect that some of it has to do with the fact that her books are so exactly what one thinks of as a girls' school story - full of 'hot friendships', tiffs, pashes, feuds and hockey - whereas EBD and EJO have slightly different preoccupations (EBD = severe illness/injury as scathing and cleansing rite of passage for True Chalet School Girls; EJO = monstrous fecundity as means of propagating the Old Order). Angela Brazil's school stories don't have much of an agenda behind them, really - they're 'pure' school stories (except the nasty jingoistic wartime ones) in that sense, though they tend to have more episodes with long-lost heiresses than, say, Dorita Fairlie Bruce does (or even Enid Blyton - hers are very straightforward in that sense).

I think a lot of hardcore school-story types view her as faintly embarrassing, but that might be because it's easy enough to find her book, you know what people are like...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:15 / 16.08.02
mmm... the more difficult things are to get hold of the more they must be worshipped.

I'd definitely agree with you on the idea of the series: I suppose people, when collecting things, like to assume that those things are related to each other in more ways than one. You could have every single book by Angela Brazil but when they aren't part of a set it's not quite as satisfying as having 62 (or 64) Chalet books sitting in front of you and knowing Joey's going to pop up in all of them.

Personally I love them, they're the perfect ideal of what a school girl should be, the books are hardbacks.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
16:26 / 21.08.02
I have just discovered a new (to me) school story writer,Antonia Forest, and am distraught to find that her books are even harder to get hold of than some of the Chalets (rows of 'gaily-jacketed school stories', I know what you mean about the series effect). You can get Autumn Term, which is the one I read, in Faber dead easily but for some reason the others are impossible, which is awful because they're great - dry and witty and not full of princesses and guff like that. Grrr.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:38 / 16.09.02
Sorry, only place I could think of where this unutterably ghastly item might be appreciated...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
23:07 / 16.09.02
OH. MY. GOD.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:26 / 17.09.02
Oh gawd, you can get mugs too. Oh Lord.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
14:44 / 17.09.02
I want more... this is just too good. hahahahahahahaha.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:16 / 09.10.02
I should like to inform everyone, just because I am so happy, that I now have a copy of The Chalet Girls Grow Up...

'Oh, I know,' Grizel put in, 'but it's more than that. Jo's always been a bit mad, of course' - Miss Annersley winced - 'but as long as her sister was alive, it was kept in check. Now she seems to have gone back to behaving like a teenager, which is all very well if you are a teenager but absurd for a middle-aged woman. Don't you think, Hilda, that a woman in her forties, with an enormous family, really should have stopped hanging around her old school? She's up here morning, noon and night, scrounging Kaffee und Kuchen from the staff and having long heart-to-hearts with the prefects about their petty little problems. Don't tell me it isn't happening. You know it is.'
 
 
Tryphena Absent
15:32 / 09.10.02
Then Margot bursts through the door, home from her missionary adventures (heheh) and collapses. Rushed to the san they discover that she is suffering from malaria. Joey becomes a middle-aged mother again and it's all OK?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
16:31 / 09.10.02
Oh no, it's much better than that. Len has been married to Reg Entwistle for 5 years and has two sets of twins... then she gets pregnant again and Reg runs off with Mary Lou; Con ends up writing Mills & Boon style romances... it's great...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:51 / 25.11.02
Hate to resurrect this old thing again but...
any thoughts on Mary Louise Parker (damn is that her name? I forget...) and Hylton Cleaver? I have discovered the best second hand bookshop in town and I think I know where my money's going for the rest of the year.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
18:42 / 25.11.02
Mary Louise Parker (if I've got the right one here) - I've only read one book by her, Suzette Wins her Way, which is pretty good though not very startling. Worth getting if it's cheapish. I think the general consensus is that she's OK, so if it's not that one it's probably OK too...

Hylton Cleaver - doesn't s/he do boy's school stories? I'm sure I've got a couple at home, called Bats of St Bede's and The Second Form Master at St Cyrils or something like that. They're a bit crappy, like most boys' school stories - far more pulpy than girls' ones, except the very literary ones like The Loom of Youth and Godfrey Marten, Schoolboy. Those are good, but some of them are really pretentious. If they're girls' books, I have no idea what they're like...

Why do I know this sort of thing? Can someone tell me?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:18 / 26.11.02
Because the British institution of boarding school (girl/boy) books is the best and we must keep it alive as long as possible. 'Dormitory Wystaria' is a must-have I think if only for the title and the first few pages were quite good. I don't really care anymore, I must buy somthing that refers to English-ness, I am going in to withdrawal.

The Cleaver began with a school boy going on about a masters footsteps coming towards him... I've forgotten the title but it wasn't particularly school related. I must buy them both.
 
  
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