Review: "The School at the Chalet" by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

The School at the Chalet by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer
Published 1925
★★★

Nostalgia reading at its finest. My mother grew up reading these, so my siblings and I grew up reading them too—we had piles of them. They were a huge part of my desire to go to boarding school (and a huge part of the reason boarding school—not in an idealized version of the Austrian Alps, and not in an idealized version of the 1920s/30s/40s—was so disorienting when I did eventually go).

Anyway, curiosity (and nostalgia) called, so here I am. And rereading this was...something. It's so much a product of its time and place that I'm not entirely sure what to do with it anymore: The girls are all basically (with a few exceptions) simple and sweet and good; the adults are all basically smart and sweet and good; the England Be Glad sense is real. Madge sets up shop in the Alps and immediately has people pounding on her door to enroll their daughters, because thank goodness there's now an English school in the Tyrol, how did we possibly educate our children without a good proper English school. She's making it all up as she goes—school fees are decided not by any calculation of costs but by Madge asking her brother if he thinks £120/year sounds reasonable. The local girls are considered the foreigners; the local adults inexplicably say "thee" and "thou" a lot; Madge begrudgingly appoints a "foreigner" as head girl because the English girls are too young.

Brent-Dyer doesn't seem to have been fond of Germans (she remarks that There is much more camaraderie between Austrians and their children than between Germans and theirs, and the Tyrolese middle class and upper middle class treat their boys and girls nearly conforming to English ideals), and there is an epic—not in a good way—running "joke" throughout the book about a fat German woman some of the girls meet. Everyone is appallingly rude—the kids, the German woman—but the adults who should be teaching the kids to do better seem to think that the German woman is automatically in the wrong because she's fat. It's one part of the book that has aged very badly (and it wasn't a good part of the book to begin with).

I'll read a bit farther into the series and see where it gets me. The lustre has come off a bit, though I expect I'll manage to forget some of my disappointment within a few years and do another read...

Counts:
Dainty: 10 (dainty uniform, dainty meal...)
Jolly: 38 (jolly clever, jolly man...)
Pretty: 28+ (her pretty head, her pretty little watch, her pretty broken German...)
Honest injun: 5. Joey is the culprit here, but everyone seems to think it's fine.