Favourite Vintage Boarding School Books

hello I'm Miranda and welcome to my youtube channel today i'm chatting about vintage school stories i loved reading boarding school stories when i was growing up i think i first started a love the boarding school fiction when I read Enid Blyton books like the Marilee Towers series when I was little and I just became fascinated by the idea of boarding schools and I wasn't actually brought up in the UK my parents traveled around a lot when I was growing up so I lived mainly in France and also in America so I had this dream of what Britain what Britain was like that was sort of largely founded on Enid Blyton I think and I desperately wanted to try things like ginger beer and sausage rolls and Scotch eggs and go off and have really elaborate picnics and adventures just like the Famous Five and I loved dreaming about England in this way and I think I just developed a real fascination for British culture and British children's literature in particular because I was living abroad but had family in the UK and romanticized it quite a lot in my mind but my love for Enid Blyton led me to other wonderful boarding school stories and that in turn led me on to really becoming a lover of vintage books and actually collecting books as a very young teenager because a lot of the books that I ended up loving weren't in print or they were extremely hard to find especially living in the States it became really difficult to find these books and my mum bless her became expert on eBay at finding you know really good value additions because they were also quite expensive some of these books that I came to love which I will tell you all about very soon but so my mum helped me to collect them when I was growing up so did my grandmother who lived in the UK and she'd go and hunt for these books for me as well and send them to me or bring them in a suitcase when she came to visit us so my love for these books is really very layered on the one hand I love the stories of these vintage boarding school books but they also have a real nostalgia for me of my childhood they remind me of both my mom and my grandma they're all my nanny as I called her who both really helped me to find and collect these books and yes they just have a very special place in my heart they really started my love for collecting books too which if you're familiar with my channel and if you wonder about the state with me and I I'm lucky to still have a lot of my childhood books I don't have all of them because I've moved so much through the years and I've lost some along the way but I've kept a sort of cool collection of some of my favorites so I wanted to share these books with you today so first of all I have to talk about the chalet school books I first started reading these when I was about nine years old my grandmother sent me a paper back that had the sort of first two Chalet schoolbooks together these were written from the 1920s right up to the 1970s there by an also called Eleanor M Brent Dyer and she was extremely prolific I think she wrote over 60 of the chalet school titles but I just fell in love with these books instantly and the first few a sect in Austria we're the shiny school is founded by a young British woman who has a very young sister and there's just so much charm to these books obviously they're very much of their time but I loved the sort of cosmopolitan multicultural mix to them having lived on the French Swiss border growing up and this sort of alpine landscape that she describes was very familiar to me and I later as a teenager went to Austria to the Tarot where many of these books are set and that was a magical trip for me to see where the original chalet school would have stood and the lake that Eleanor and Brent are described so much in these books and it made it really all come alive for me and that was a very special moment but it also felt familiar to me having gone to an international school and the chalet school is very much an international school too with students from many different nationalities that come to it and a lot of them come for their health initially because the school is set up near a sanatorium and later a lot of the girls go on and Mary's and doctors in the books which is quite funny but the series really revolves around a few central characters Madge Bethany the founder and her sister Jo Bethany becomes a really really important character and you see Jo grow up and marry and have children of her own and then her children end up going to the chalet school and I really enjoyed that sort of seeing these characters become young women and then mothers through the series I enjoyed that continuity as a child the Charlotte school itself moves to several different locations it starts out in Austria but then with the rise of see Germany the school moves to the Channel Islands to Guernsey but then when those are invaded the school moves I think to Wales and then eventually it moves back to Switzerland and I I really loved the Swiss books too having gone to the international school Geneva and knowing Switzerland parrot fairly well that felt quite special to me so I think I was hearing identified having moved around a lot as a child with the chalet school those are sort of moving different locations but still making the most of wherever they were that was something I sort of strongly identified with as a child but on a superficial level they're just enjoyable entertaining stories like I said I was sort of fascinated by the boarding school culture I didn't particularly want to go to forwarding school I think even I knew that the reality wouldn't be quite the same and there are funny things like all the girls really sort of believe in taking cold baths and that that's really good for your house and I tried you know having like cold showers myself a nice young and absolutely hated it that didn't last long but in the early books too they always have like cafe and couch and I think that really started my love coffee culture I'd have to say it was reading these books but yes they're just really lovely school stories I love the earlier editions and sort of first I think 14 to 20 or titles were illustrated by Nina cabe Risley and I love her illustrations this is a photocopy just wrapper this is actually a first edition so this is very precious to me the school at the chalet is the first title in the chalet school series this is a first edition that I got so many so many years ago I think maybe when I was 14 or something it was a birthday present and I still have it it's still so special to me and it has the original finding a Cobra's lee inside which is also very very special to me but I think her covers are just stunning these have been reprinted over the years by girls gone by press though unfortunately a lot of those have now gone out the print so I'm afraid they are still quite tricky to find the originals are very tricky to find and they can be expensive you really have to look very carefully and really keep your eye on places like eBay and to snap up any bargains with these books but I adore them they're important part of my childhood so I wanted to share them in this video so essentially there was there were sort of three really big boarding school writers before the whole sort of Enid Blyton period and they were Eleanor M Brent Dyer dorita Farley Bruce and lcj oxen Han I became obsessed with all of these books when I was little it was quite funny all my friends are reading you know the baby-sitters club and goosebumps or something and I was just obsessed with finding these old fashioned out of print boarding school stories but I absolutely loved 13z books to buy dorita Farley Bruce she was incredibly popular she was second only to Angela Brazel who is also a famous school story writer but she's never been a favorite of mine a lot of people like her but her stories um they just really they just weren't for me I never enjoyed the plots all the characters very much and I think they actually have aged really badly obviously all of these books are of their time but I think there's something more timeless in quality to the shiny schoolbooks and the DIMMs ebooks and even the Albee books but dorita fairly Bruce was a Scottish the the dims ebooks actually aren't set in Scotland they're set in a boarding school in Kent but the main heroine dim Z is Scottish and again these books were lovely and that you you see dim Z grow up through the course of the series and become a young woman and unusually for school story fiction you actually follow dim Z's story after she's left school and you see her marry and one of the last books is set during the Second World War and she grows a sort of herb garden and makes medicines and stuff from this garden which really fascinated me when I first read it as a young girl but these are really really charming stories too I think dorita fairly Bruce is a really excellent writer actually and he's a really strong school story fiction she also wrote the nancy school series and she also wrote the Springdale school series this is one of the Springdale books captain for Springdale my favorites were the dimers ebooks and the Springdale books although I did also like Nancy but these two are definitely my favorite and the Springdale books were actually set in Scotland which I enjoyed a lot as well and yes again they're just really nice characters in these books I could identify with the girls in them and yes really really charming school story fiction then the Alba girls were actually my very favorite of them all and they are a bit of an oddity in some ways in that these stories don't so much end up centering around a school though the very first in the books which is called the the very first in a series sorry is called the girls of the hamlet club which I do actually have it's very rare but I forgot to I forgot to gather it in my while I'm sure I'll end up showing you another time but that's another like prized possession of mine and in the girls of the hamlet club a young girl Cecily goes to a her sort of local school in the village and she realizes that the school is very divided between these rather sort of stuck-up girls and then the girls from local Hamlet's around who are for the most part quite a bit poorer than the other set of girls and they can only attend the school on scholarship and they're sort of ostracized by the sort of better off girls and especially thinks this is very wrong and she decides to form a club which he calls the hamlet girls or the hamlet club and so the girls all form a part of this club and they sort of act and do things together and they end up sort of saving the day at the school play when the other girls for some reason can't perform and the Hamlet can't come and do the performance and save the day and then one of the girls is crowned queen at the end because there's a lot of references to folklore and it's a sort of folk dancing and typical English traditions like that in the LC j ox and ham books and the girls of the hamlet club all all learn how to folk dance they do Morris dancing and this becomes a huge theme within her books the Abbey girls is actually what in some ways starts the series properly because this one introduces the Abbey which isn't a school it's actually a ruined Abbey two girls two sisters Joan and joy surely end up coming and living at the gatehouse of a to the grand mansion and there's this ruined Abbey within mansions grounds hence they're called the Abbey girls now they go to the same school that Cecily did in the girls of the hamlet Club but the series becomes much more about the sort of individual girls themselves the school is far less of the character like I would I would say that the school itself is quite a big character in series like the chalet school books and the dutifully Bruce books for instance with this it's much more actually about what happens outside of the school and about the personal relationships and the personal friendships that the female characters form and Jen and I are two very important characters and this book introduces the Abbey which they enjoy as a place of beauty and calm and solace and the abbey itself becomes really important throughout the series it's based on a real ruined Abbey as well in summer search with which I actually went to see again as a young teenager and was so excited to sort of see the real setting of the Abigail books I just adored these I was fascinated by all the folk dancing reference when I was young Elsie Jayhawks and ham also had a fascination for sort of ceramics and pottery and like crafts in general and that really comes through in the books too and I really enjoyed that when I was young as well so out of them all the Abbey girls even trumped the Charlie school books for me I just adored them I think with all of them apart from dorita Farley Bruce her series were shorter and I would say they really kept the quality strong all the way through sadly with the Shire school books and the Abbey School books and the Abbey books the quality does tell off it you know it the books aren't as good the later in the series you get it's definitely the first I don't know maybe 15 or something are definitely strongest in both series and those are the ones that I would reread still now I'm not sure I would read the whole series of each again because the earlier ones are by far the strongest in my opinion but they're they are really charming those the early books and all of them I think is still very much worth reading okay and then another real favorite series I don't think is as well-known either the Melling books by Margaret Bix the first one is called the Blake's come to Melling this is quite a short series they're really probably less than ten titles I can't remember exactly but there aren't that many titles in this series and I really loved these books it's about a family to move I think to Cambridge I think at this second like the Cambridge er Fenland's or something but you get to know all of those sort of characters in this family and this book is really about Helen the older sister who's a very laid-back happy-go-lucky kind of person and I always wanted to be a bit more like Helen when I was little because I was in fact more like Libby who is the head girl of the school in this book and Helen and Libby at first don't get on at all but then they end up becoming best friends and Libby is a lot more sort of tense so she worries a lot and Helens always so calm and laid-back and I always have a tendency to be a bit of mote over-thinker myself so I always wanted to be more like Helen the characters in these books just felt so real to me when I was young they're so well drawn and I in fact ended up writing to Margaret Biggs because I was so excited when I was young to realize she was still alive you know because sadly so many of these authors that I loved had died a long time ago and and I was so excited when I realised that Margaret Biggs was still alive I found address and I wrote to her when I was young and she replied to me and I still have some letters and like Christmas cards from her that I've kept because they were just really special to me when I received them at the time and she was she such a lovely woman the way that she responded to me was really charming and I think she was just delighted to realize she's still I had a fan in young girls you know even years down the line from when these were originally published so this series is very close to my heart and then I also loved the merry series there are three titles in this series I think there's I think we call Mary begins Mary again Mary alone Oh something like that I have all three I used to be able to trot off like every title of all these series all the time but it's been a while since I read things so my memories got a little bit rusty but these are special because they're actually by New Zealand writer and they're set in New Zealand and I really enjoyed that change of setting and when I was growing up and they're just really charming reads I wish Claire merrily had written more books because she was such a talented writer and these were monks my very favorites when I was young she always wrote this book that isn't part of the merry series but it's called the pen and pencil girls and this was really influential to me when I was a young girl it's about a group of friends who set up a club called the pen and pencil Club outside of school and they take it in turns to write stories and they realize that the best stories come from sort of real life not from sort of grand imaginings and that's what the best writing comes from and yeah I adored this book when I was little and I there are so many crema on eat out clare merrily titles that meant a lot to me I've seen loved Leafs and friends when I was little sadly her books are really rare though girls gone by have republished some but like I said those keep out-of-print - so sadly these are quite hard to find and then finally I wanted to talk about antonia forest a lot of people who love boarding school stories really love antonia forest i enjoyed lucy Mangan's biblia memoir bookworm because she talks about Antonia forest in that book and how much she just adored these when she was young and I met Lucy Mangan at a book event a while ago now and I mentioned to her that I liked - Antonia virus as well and I've actually met Antonia forest when I was young and in fact I got this book signed by her which was really special it says Miranda with all good wishes Antonia Forest and Lucy Mangal is just so excited that I'd actually had met Antonia Forest which was really sweet but these but factually didn't love initially when I was young I think I read them a bit too young and it took me a little while to get into them I kept trying because I just heard of so many people who who loved them and in fact I think I was just a bit too young for them I liked them so much more when I was older and in fact I reread this one quite recently autumn town which is the first one in the series and I was struck again actually by what an accomplished writer Antonia forest is I think these books deserve to be much more widely recognised I wish that Persephone would republish them actually because Persephone we do republish some children's books and I think Antonio forest would be a really good fit for them a lot of people in fact compared Antonia forest writing star to Jane Austen which I find interesting I think she's even sharper than Jane Austen but she does have a wonderful eye for human character and for detail and there is a lot of very English sort of understated wit these books which I do enjoy they followed the Marlo family which is a large family and all the girls go to the same boarding school and these books I would say are quite unusual school stories in that the characters and the plots are much more intricately drawn than is typical in most boarding school literature and I mean in comparison to the other ones I've mentioned these books are much better written I mean I still love all of the other books I've talked about you know for lots of different reasons when it when it comes though to the quality of the writing Antonia Forest definitely is just a link above the rest of them she pays so much attention to her characters they're very finely drawn they're all very complicated to you know these are shown to be complicated young women with many different issues many different motivations and desires going on she really talks about some of the darker aspects to female friendship and sibling rivalry in these books so they are sometimes tinged with real tragedy well done all sort of darker things and is perhaps common than a lot of school story fiction but they're all the better for that I think although yes maybe for a bit of an older audience and you know maybe give the sherry schoolbooks to but they also read really well as an adult as well and I'd like to actually go back and reread all of the series now I read autumn term last summer I'd like to read the rest again because I was just really impressed once more by the quality of the writing some of these are a little bit easier to find you can still find these kind of puffin paperbacks a bit more easily but finally they are getting harder and harder to find still but anyway those are some of the titles I wanted to talk about as sharing my passion for vintage school stories with you all I'd love to know if you loved boarding school stories when you were young did you read any of these books or did you read in a Blyton for instance I'd really be interested in knowing and it's always lovely to know of another shall a school or a b-girl fan so do let me know if you did read any of these books um but yes thank you so much for watching do you give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and don't forget to subscribe to my channel which you can do by clicking on my face that pops up on the screen but I'll be back again very soon with another video bye

Channel: Miranda Mills

Views: 3,775

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Chalet School Books, Elinor M Brent-Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie J Oxenham, Boarding School Books, books, reading, booktube, bookstagram

Id: yuLh6vEcvkw

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020