All you need to know about books at www.booksmonthly.co.uk                                                     Issue 4 July 2008

Bettany Press

Behind the Chalet School. Helen McClelland 1996, 320pp, ISBN 978 0 9524680 2 8 £14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Little was known about Elinor M. Brent-Dyer until after her death, when Helen McClelland originally began her researches. Since the first edition of her biography was published in 1981, new information has made it possible to give a much fuller picture of Brent-Dyer's early life and to fill in some of the gaps that remained in her story. Many sections of the book have been not only revised but expanded; more details are included about Chalet School locations; and a whole new chapter covers Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's birth centenary celebrations and the amazing growth of the Chalet School legend during the 1990s. One or two old questions have been answered and some "missing" people have been found, including Elinor's vanished half-brother. The book also includes several new illustrations and an appendix on the sometimes problematic chronology of the Chalet School series. "Documentary research and many interviews with friends and relatives of Elinor Brent-Dyer are put together in an absorbing book which presents her in the round, her unattractive traits and her passionate ambitions, her abundant energy and her eccentricities. Students of children's literature will be especially grateful for the careful analysis of readers' opinions and fan letters . . . The fact that the biographer has not tried to sum up or dogmatise does her credit: the facts she has amassed are used to delineate a fallible, complex and fascinating person."
- Margery Fisher on the first edition. "Lovers of Brent-Dyer who do not already have a copy of Behind the Chalet School will obviously want to buy this book. But it can be heartily recommended to everyone: quite apart from the masses of new material, it has been beautifully produced by the Bettany Press, and its larger print size and higher quality paper makes it far easier to read than the original"
- Sue Sims, Folly

Two Chalet School Girls in India. Priyadarshini Narendra December 2006, 238pp, ISBN 978-0-9552973-3-5
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK)  When Joey is at a loss to know how to deal with an unwanted suitor, an invitation arrives from Dick and Mollie to spend the winter in India. The Robin is also in need of a break, after losing her father earlier in the year. The visit will change their lives forever, and the friendships they make will have long-lasting repercussions. This is the book that Chalet School fans across the world have been waiting for. Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s story of what happened when Joey Bettany and the Robin visited India was never published, and no trace of it remains. Readers seemed destined never to know the answers to questions ranging from how did Joey meet Erica Standish’s mother, to why Joey tore out the pictures from Mollie’s copy of Queechy? Now Priyadarshini Narendra has written her own version of the story, remaining as true to the Chalet School series as possible. Priyadarshini lives in New Delhi, and has been a Chalet School collector since the age of six. With a foreword by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s biographer, Helen McClelland, explaining the history of the original book.

The Chalet School Companion. Helen McClelland 2004, 142pp, ISBN 978 0 9524680 8 0
£9.99 (includes p&p in the UK) This fascinating collection of articles written by Helen McClelland contains:

• A biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

• Information about the staff and pupils of the school and the locations where the books are set

• The history of the Chalet School, from its small beginnings in Austria to its happy ending in Switzerland

• Questions and Answers

• Information about the Chalet School fan movement, and details of the New Chalet Club and Friends of the Chalet School

Visitors for the Chalet School. Helen McClelland, with illustrations by Anne Thompson
1995, 256pp, ISBN 978 09524680 1 1
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Elinor M. Brent-Dyer never completed her account of the term following The Princess of the Chalet School (Chambers, 1927). Fortunately, however, she did leave some notes outlining the story, and using these and other clues, her biographer Helen McClelland has been able to reconstruct a fascinating account of that early Christmas term. Illustrated by Anne Thompson, Visitors for the Chalet School is a long-awaited treat for Chalet School fans of all ages.  "As well as wonderfully true in atmosphere and characterisation to Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's originals, Visitors for the Chalet School is an immensely enjoyable story in its own right. Helen McClelland and Bettany Press are to be congratulated for providing us with this missing link in the ever-lambent Chalet School saga." - Mary Cadogan. "This is a piece of skilled craftmanship. Although in some ways rather better written than the originals, it has all the hallmarks of one. It really is superb and I am overcome with admiration (I started reading it prepared to be critical)." - Sheila Ray. "There's a featured girl, Patricia Davidson, who hopes that Joey will help her realise her dreams of becoming a doctor, and all the usual obsessions with the weather and gorging ('delicious spicy soup . . . Blaubeeren Torte with whipped cream and finally plates of Viennese honey and nut biscuits'). McClelland has a wonderful knack for period detail, coming up with Elinor-esque party games, songs, slang." - Robin Blake, Independent on Sunday

Jean of Storms. Elinor M. Brent-Dyer  1996, 256pp, ISBN 978 09524680 3 5 £14.99 (includes p&p in the UK)   Although Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's fans include thousands of adult women in countries as far apart as Australia and the USA, until recently it was thought that she had written only for younger readers and had never made use in fiction of her native South Tyneside background. But the chance discovery of Jean of Storms, originally serialised in the Shields Gazette in 1930, has revealed not only a full-length adult novel, but one set in the district around South Shields, where she herself grew up. As the first new Brent-Dyer novel to be published for 26 years, its appearance in book form has been eagerly awaited by fans since it was found in 1995 by a South Shields librarian, Doris Johnson.  Unlike Brent-Dyer's Chalet School stories, Jean of Storms is a domestic tale - although it does, inevitably, include one of the dramatic rescue scenes which characterise the Chalet School series. In many ways it is a poignant story, dealing as it does with the lives of three women during their brief period of independence between leaving school and getting married. Their bond of friendship is strong enough to enable Oona and Jean to bring up two orphaned sisters, - after fighting to protect the welfare of the older - for Molly to escape from a tyrannical landlady as well as earning a living teaching folk-dancing, and for Jean to resist the religious tyranny of her servant Morag. However, Brent-Dyer clearly saw the ending, when the women's circle is broken, as inevitable and preferable to their lives together. Molly and Jean marry a curate and doctor respectively (all Chalet School heroines marry doctors) and raise children with their husbands, while the older Oona, whose chance of marriage vanished when her fiancé was killed in the First World War, has her independence and enjoyment of life permanently affected by a back injury. "Jean of Storms is a romantic story, very much of its period. But the gifts as a story-teller that Elinor M. Brent-Dyer showed in her Chalet School books are evident here, too. In particular, her capacity to create characters, both sympathetic and otherwise, who immediately involve the reader and keep the pages turning to the end," says Helen McClelland, author of Behind the Chalet School, the revised edition of Brent-Dyer's biography which is published by Bettany Press. Little was known of Brent-Dyer's South Tyneside background during her lifetime, and it is only in recent years that a full picture has emerged. Unlike her heroines, Brent-Dyer grew up in a small terraced house in South Shields, with no bathroom or inside toilet. Her father left home when she was three years old, and her mother spent many years claiming to be a widow before - now genuinely widowed - remarrying when Brent-Dyer was 19. Like her mother, Brent-Dyer made every effort to hide her social origins, but since her Chalet School stories continually denounce snobbery, it is likely that this was from fear of the professional and personal consequences. In many ways it must have been a relief to Brent-Dyer when the household - she lived with her mother until her mother's death in 1957 - moved to Hereford in 1933. But as a native daughter who spent the first 39 years of her life in South Shields, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer now deserves to take her rightful place as a local author alongside her long-held position as a writer who is known to millions of girls and women worldwide. As the story of Behind the Chalet School shows, the pattern for the rest of her life was set before she moved, including the creation of the Chalet School series in 1925 and her conversion to Catholicism in 1930, the same year that Jean of Storms was serialised. With Jean of Storms, fans and locals alike have finally gained a direct link between Brent-Dyer's literature and her life.

Susan and Friends: The Jane Shaw Companion. Alison Lindsay (editor)
2002, 352pp, ISBN 978 09524680 6 6
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Susan and Friends is the essential companion to your Jane Shaw collection - or an ideal introduction to the work of this increasingly popular author. The book gathers together her published short stories, hitherto lost to sight in hard-to-find annuals, as well as unpublished stories from Jane Shaw's personal archives. Accompanying Jane Shaw's own words are critical essays on the books and their settings, a fascinating account by Ian Evans of the family friends who appear as dedicatees of his mother's books, and a full bibliography. Susan and Friends is edited by Alison Lindsay, who has spent several years researching Jane Shaw's life and writings. Fully illustrated. For a full list of contents, click here. To learn more about Jane Shaw's life and the archive of her personal papers, now deposited in the National Library of Scotland, click here. To read the opening chapters of The Man at the Villa Carlotta, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Shaw, click here. To view maps of the sites where Jane Shaw's books are set, drawn by Elsepth Insch, click here.

Where is Susan? Jane Shaw May 2006, 173pp, ISBN 978 09552973 2 8
£12.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Where is Susan? is set in a new destination for Jane Shaw, Venice. Susan and her cousin Midge arrive there expecting to meet Charlotte and spend a few days exploring before welcoming Susan’s parents off the ship which has brought them from Africa. Susan, rendered even more excitable than usual by the prospect of seeing her parents after three years, is heart-broken when she learns that their ship is in quarantine because of suspected yellow fever, and the pair are startled to find that their hotel has no record of their booking. Susan, naturally, falls on her feet and the two girls find refuge with the charming sister of a gondolier. Meanwhile, Charlotte is combing the city for her sister and cousin. The introduction of the ghastly Gascoignes, in Venice for the ‘Bean-alley’ (Susan’s version of the Biennale), ensures Susan and Midge have a difficult time avoiding them while trying to find Charlotte and the Lyles. In the end, of course, everyone is reunited after Susan’s successful capture of a hotel thief. As with all Jane Shaw’s books, the charm of the story is enhanced by the lively descriptions of setting. The essential elements of Venetian life, like pizza, gondoliers, pigeons and expensive cafes in Piazza San Marco all feature. The Gascoignes are as frightful as ever, although Peregrine (Pea-green to his friends) has developed a taste for Nuttella spread which he shares with the girls. Frantic chases across the city by foot, gondolier and vaporetto are required in order to reunite one of Charlotte’s newly-acquired young men with a valuable stamp which the beautiful but slightly incompetent spy placed in Susan’s papers for safe-keeping. Readers familiar with Susan will know this is about the silliest move any one could make! To learn more about Jane Shaw's life and the archive of her personal papers, now deposited in the National Library of Scotland, click here. To read the opening chapters of The Man at the Villa Carlotta, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Shaw, click here. To view maps of the sites where Jane Shaw's books are set, drawn by Elsepth Insch, click here.

Unseen Childhoods: Disabled Characters in 20th-Century Books for Girls. Helen Aveling
Summer 2008, ISBN 978 0 9552973 5 9
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) This collection of essays by British and American authors, all of whom have personal experience of disability, is edited by Helen Aveling. Disabled characters are few and far between in children’s literature, and those that do exist are often stereotyped and two-dimensional. But there are characters - and authors - who buck the trend, appearing in books by favourites such as Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie J. Oxenham, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, L M Montgomery, Eleanor H. Porter and Frances Hodgson Burnett, as well in books as by lesser-known authors. Unseen Childhoods examines disabled role models, stereotypes and the inclusion/exclusion of disabled characters in 20th-century books for girls and looks at how these change and develop - or fail to change and develop - from the early years through to the middle period and then the last years of the century. The representation of characters with impairments ranging from diabetes and visual impairment to illness and mental health difficulties is discussed alongside the representation of family members and wider society. Accessible and varied, this collection of essays will appeal to everyone with an interest in children's books, as well as students and scholars working in the fields of Children's Literature and Disability Studies. Visit Helen Aveling's Topsyweb to find out more about the background to the book.

A World of Girls. Rosemary Auchmuty
2004, 254pp, ISBN 978 09524680 9 7
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) In this lively and controversial book, first published in 1992, Rosemary Auchmuty takes a radical new look at this guilty delight, asking just why so many readers are addicted to the genre — and discovers a powerful world of independent young women living together without the dominating influence of men. Taking a fascinating, indepth look at the Abbey books by Elsie Jeanette Oxenham, the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce’s Nancy, Springdale and Dimsie stories, and Enid Blyton’s boarding school books, A World of Girls proves conclusively that they provided active role models and positive images for a massive readership of girls and women. Rosemary Auchmuty teaches law at the University of Westminster, and is a respected scholar, critic and writer who has published extensively. She was one of the editors of The Encyclopaedia of School Stories (Ashgate, 2000) and is the author of A World of Women: Growing Up in the Girls' School Story (The Women's Press, 1999).

The Chalet School Revisited. Rosemary Auchmuty & Ju Gosling (editors)
1994, 336pp, ISBN 978 09524680 0 4
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Edited and with an introduction by Rosemary Auchmuty and Ju Gosling, The Chalet School Revisited was published to commemorate the birth centenary of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (1894-1969), author of the Chalet School series of books for girls. Including:

Rosemary Auchmuty on the role of Guides and other girls' organisations in the series; Gill Bilski on collecting and dealing in the books; Clarissa Cridland on the dust wrappers, covers and illustrations of the series; Polly Goerres on the centenary celebrations and the reasons for the books' appeal; Ju Gosling on the Chalet School as an educational institution; Judith Humphrey on the role of religion in the series; Helen McClelland on her search for Brent-Dyer's life story; Sheila Ray on the literary context Sue Sims on the series factor

The School by the River . Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
1999, 256pp, ISBN 978 09524680 4 2
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Out of print for more than half a century, The School by the River is Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's most sought-after book. Set in a "Ruritanian" kingdom and loosely connected to the Chalet School series, this full-length novel concerns the fortunes of a gifted young English girl, Jennifer Craddock, and her friends, students at the music college in the Balkan kingdom of Mirania. First published in 1930, when Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was at the height of her creative powers, and imbued with her characteristic spirit of place and lively characters, The School by the River is far more than just another boarding-school story. Bettany Press is delighted to publish this new edition, with an Introduction by Helen McClelland.

Friends in the Fourth. Sheena Wilkinson
Autumn 2007, ISBN 978 0 9552973 4 2
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Sheena Wilkinson sets girls' school stories alongside 'school novels' for women, and celebrates their common themes of girls' friendships. Books by Antonia White, Rosamund Lehmann, Janice Elliott, Andrea Newman and Angela Lambert are discussed alongside books by Antonia Forest, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer and other 'children's' authors. Sheena originally researched this book for her PhD - delegates at last summer's Antonia Forest conference in Bournemouth enjoyed their preview of the chapter on Antonia Forest so much that we decided to publish it! Friends in the Fourth is a must for all those who have ever made a friend through collecting girls' school stories, or who read the books because they recall girlhood friendships, or who just want to clarify why they read them. Also, of course, essential reading for students and scholars of children's literature and women's studies.About the author: Sheena Wilkinson was born in Belfast in 1968 and took a First in English, French and Italian at University College, Durham before studying for the PhD on which Friends in the Fourth is based. "I used to feel guilty about my enduring love of children's literature, until I hit on the cunning idea of studying the relationship between children's and adults' fiction which made it respectable." In 1993 she returned to Northern Ireland, where she teaches English in a large grammar school. Sheena's ambitions have been the same since she was twelve - to have a pony, and to publish lots of books. She achieved the first in 2002 when she acquired Scarlet, a Welsh cob. Friends in the Fourth is her first published book, though she has recently completed a novel and won the Brian Moore Award in 2006 for her short story 'Amputees'. Sheena lives in the County Down countryside with cats Peter and Harriet and an unmanageable, though sadly rather motley, collection of books.

A Job for Susan. Jane Shaw May 2006 160pp, ISBN 978 09552973 0 4
£12.99 (includes p&p in the UK) In A Job for Susan, her parents are at last returned from Africa, after three years during which Susan lived with her Carmichael cousins in Wichwood. Fortunately Mr and Mrs Lyle are equally enchanted with Wichwood Village, and rent Maggie Zimmerli’s little house just five minutes walk from the Carmichaels’. Christmas is on its way, but Bill is feeling only panic as he realises his rash promise to raise £10 for Oxfam over the holidays must be fulfilled. Susan happily springs into action to help him out, and embarks on a spurt of inexpert but enthusiastic fundraising. Once they find out the value of rare coins, their search for a 1953 penny becomes the stuff of farce, but a trip to the bank to acquire a small sack of change results in the capture of some local hoodlums. Wichwood Village in real life was Dulwich, where Jane Shaw and her family spent several happy years before emigrating to South Africa. All the houses and shops mentioned in the book can be traced on a map of Dulwich; even better is an afternoon stroll round this charming part of south London. For readers who have followed her career over the past ten books, it is curiously satisfying to read of Susan’s unmarred happiness in finally having her parents home again, and of her delight in introducing her schoolfriend Tessa, who joins Susan for the holidays, to her Wichwood haunts. To learn more about Jane Shaw's life and the archive of her personal papers, now deposited in the National Library of Scotland, click here. To read the opening chapters of The Man at the Villa Carlotta, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Shaw, click here. To view maps of the sites where Jane Shaw's books are set, drawn by Elsepth Insch, click here.

Susan's Kind Heart . Jane Shaw May 2006, 153pp, ISBN 978 09552973 1 1
£12.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Susan’s Kind Heart brings Susan and her cousins Midge and Charlotte Carmichael to France, in the optimistic hope that this will improve their French (ah, remember the days when learning French was an essential part of a girl’s curriculum?). Being Susan, she is no sooner arrived than she begins interfering in everyone’s lives. Staying at the château are an assortment of paying guests, including English and German schoolboys Oliver and Willie, who become caught up in all Susan’s little schemes. Oliver, destined for a glittering career in the Foreign Office, finds himself playing his guitar in a small café because Susan feels sorry for the owner’s failure to attract customers. Willie, son of the German Kommandent who occupied the château during the Second World War, is more preoccupied with discovering and restoring to its rightful owners the family silver which his father knows was hidden nearby.  Their charming French hostess, Danielle, is in love with her cousin, but fears it is only the château which appeals to him. Susan is fully occupied with bestowing happy endings on everyone – except, of course, for the suave smuggler who gets his comeuppance in the final exciting pages. The village of Kerdic on the north coast of Brittany will be known already to Jane Shaw fans, as it features under various names in her first book, Breton Holiday, as well as Twopence Coloured and The Moochers Abroad. Here, in its final appearance in her work, it remains as charming as ever. Jane Shaw herself, along with a cousin, spent a summer in the real chateau in Binic before the Second World War, and the holiday activities of Susan and her cousins mirror her experiences three decades before. Apart from the breath-taking plot, the book perfectly conveys all the pleasures of an endless sunny summer, with bathes, walks and just sitting around talking and singing. To learn more about Jane Shaw's life and the archive of her personal papers, now deposited in the National Library of Scotland, click here. To read the opening chapters of The Man at the Villa Carlotta, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Shaw, click here. To view maps of the sites where Jane Shaw's books are set, drawn by Elsepth Insch, click here.

Time and Again. Margaret Moncrieff (Helen McClelland) September 2001, 188pp, 978 09524680 5 9
£9.99 (includes p&p in the UK) The name Helen McClelland is familiar to fans of schoolgirl literature worldwide. But the author is equally well-known in the musical world as the cellist Margaret Moncrieff, and the setting for her latest novel, Time and Again, is a music school in Scotland. Here, mysterious happenings and a rather unusual kind of time slip show a new approach to the traditional school story. "Time and Again is a touching and not-to-be-missed novel in which the potent ingredients of elusive memories, great music and a 'haunted' old turret room link young people from very different societies and periods. The deftly handled time shifts satisfyingly convey the atmosphere of both the late 1930s and the present day."- Mary Cadogan

Worlds Apart. Margaret Moncrieff (Helen McClelland)
2003, 258pp (large format) ISBN 978 09524680 7 3
£19.99 (includes p&p in the UK) Memoirs of the worlds of family, music, and of course girls’ school stories, from Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s biographer and the author of Visitors for the Chalet School and Time and Again.

Margaret Moncrieff Kelly has a wide reputation as a cellist, both performer and teacher, and is also well known in the world of schoolgirl fiction as the writer and biographer Helen McClelland. The daughter of Lord Moncrieff, she was born in Edinburgh in the 1920s. She grew up in a strongly Protestant environment but was educated at convent schools, her parents both having converted to Roman Catholicism. The socially restricted world of her early childhood was swept away by the 1939-45 war, and against all family traditions she chose to become a professional cellist, studying in Edinburgh, London and Paris, where she worked for over a year with Pierre Fournier. From 1952 she pursued a freelance career based in London, and in 1955 she joined a trio with the young Scottish pianist, Alexander Kelly, with whom she was to marry in 1957 and later to have two daughters. Worlds Apart, covering memories of growing up in a vanished world and of living three different lives, is her seventh published book. A fascinating story of the life of a woman who has brought so many of us such pleasure. "These autobiographical memoirs bring the author’s several worlds together with potency and charm." - Mary Cadogan.
"Fascinating to learn something about the background of a wonderful cellist and colleague." - William ('Wibb') Bennett . "Such an interesting life, and she has the power to evoke it beautifully." - Rosemary Auchmuty. "A must for anyone interested in Scotland, music, books or social history. Her many different worlds are evocatively captured - sometimes almost painfully, though humour is seldom far away." - Iain Burnside

A World of Women. Rosemary Auchmuty
2008, 254pp, ISBN 978 0 9552973 6 6
£14.99 (includes p&p in the UK) In A World of Women, Rosemary Auchmuty examines the novels in which the heroines of girls' school stories grow up. To what extent, she asks, do these heroines fulfil their potential as active and independent young women? Why do even their unmarried women creators so often marry them off? Do they then settle down to domesticity and submission to men? Or is there more going on than meets the eye? With exhilarating style, Rosemary Auchmuty examines the Abbey Girl books by Elsie J. Oxenham, the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, and Dorita Fairlie Bruce's Nancy, Springdale and Dimsie stories, and utterly overthrows conventional critiques of their work. Originally published in 1999 by The Women’s Press.

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