Mary Elizabeth Braddon Part I

Mary Elizabeth Braddon isn’t well known now, but her books were best sellers in their day. She was one of the early writers of “sensation fiction” like Wilkie Collins. Collins’ books often concentrated on crime and were “detective fiction”. Braddon’s prolific output tended to focus more about the position of women, in society... She wrote of women who ended up in difficulties because under law they were treated differently to men, because they could not earn a living as men could, and because they were blamed and shamed, if they got into unconventional sexual relationships, than there was for men.
Braddon was less radical than Collins, who was inclined to “have a mission” in his books, but she herself had acted in a way that was considered very scandalous… She was the daughter of an actor, who had not been very good at providing for his family. She herself became an actress, and supported her mother and family for a time. In Victorian times, acting was still considered an improper profession for a woman, by most people. It was becoming more acceptable but ladies and middle class women did not go in for it. However it was gradually rising in status, from being “no better than prostitution” and some actresses were “quite respectable” and “ladylike”. They supported themselves by their effort on the stage and didn’t have “admirers” who helped to keep them.
Braddon however gave up the stage and wanted to go into writing. She then met the publisher John Maxwell who gave her a start with publishing her first novels. He was a married man whose wife had mental problems. She was living apart from him and their children because she needed care, and after a time Mary Braddon moved in with Maxwell as his wife. There was talk because some people knew that the first Mrs Maxwell was not dead. However, Braddon continued to be Maxwell’s mistress and stepmother to his family, and she gave birth to several children herself. 
(There is a similar situation in Wllkie Collins’ NO NAME where his heroines’ father had made a bad marriage to an immoral woman, while a very young man. He and his wife lived apart and few knew of the marriage. Later he found a “good” woman who was willing to live with him, as his wife, knowing that she could not legally marry him unless his legal wife died. They had 2 daughters, who were illegitimate, but their situation was not known. He then found that his wife had died abroad and he and the mother of his children were able to marry quietly and regularise the situation. However the foolish man didn’t realise that when he married his lady, and made her his wife, this negated the Will he had made leaving property to his 2 illegitimate daughters, and that he needed to make a new will on marriage).
This real life case and the Novel No Name… shows that under the façade of respectability there were a lot of people in Victorian England who conformed officially to the mores of the time but were secretly behaving in a very scandalous fashion. 
More follows!

Wilkie Collins

I’m reading a biography of Willkie Collins at present.  He was a friend of Dickens, and is famous for writing the first real detective story in English... the Moonstone.

The Moonstone is held to be a classic; it is about the disappearance of a famous Indian diamond and how its theft was solved.  Collins also wrote sensation novels, with several differet narrators, and with highly coloured characters and complicated and exciting plots, often featuring disputed or secret marriages.   Other works of his include “No Name” which criticises British inheritance and marriage laws especially insofar as they affected women, who were usually considered of less importance in terms of inheriting property, than their brothers.

Collins however in spite of his radical political views and his sympathy with women, had 2 mistresses, and had children by both of them but seemed reluctant to give either woman the status and security of marriage.  His own behaviour towards the women in his life was almost as unsympathetic as Dickens’ towards his wife, Catherine.  One of his families was left in poverty within years of his death, and the women were not really part of his social life as they weren’t his legal wives.

His other very famous novel was the thrilling “Woman in White” which has often been adapted for stage and TV and is very popular.   however the heroine Marian Halcombe, is “ugly”. As such, although she’s ten times more interesting and intelligent than Laura, her half-sister who marries the hero, Walter Hartwright, she doesn’t get a marriage or any happy ending other than being her sisters’ companion and the spinster aunt!

Beds and Blue Jeans -Novella

This is a light but realistic romance about a young contemporary couple (Samuel and Pattie) getting to know each other, after they have slid into a romance and had a baby...
It is warm and realistic and fun.... 
http://www.amazon.com/Beds-Blue-Jeans...

Elinor and the Chalet School Part IV

Elinor found running the Margaret Roper school more difficult than she had anticipated... When World War II broke out, the school got more pupils, because of issues such as air raids, financial problems meaning that a local school was useful to middle class families in Hereford. As a local lady said “it filled a need” for some years.  However after the war, numbers went down.  The better off middle class families began to send their daughters to Boarding school again and Elinor found that her school was attracting more of a social mix and was less successful..

This put off the middle class pupils’ families and the school began to decline.  Elinor was a good teacher but she wasn’t good at the organisational side of running a school and as a result the place was somewhat chaotic.  Her Mother, Nellie Ainsley was in charge of the catering and was not really up to organising cookery and meals for a number of girls, with wartime and post War rationing to add to her troubles.  The girls said that the food was terrible. Elinor and her mother both also adored cats and there were issues about the cats being allowed to roam around the kitchen.

On the academic side, Elinor’s lack of common sense and organisation created problems.  She sometimes forgot about classes when she was busy with a book, and the girls took advantage of her negligence.  People have referred to her as "living in Chalet Land" rather than the real world at times.

Over 10 years the school did moderately well but it is probable that she was relieved when it finally came to an end.  

She went on writing and the Chalet School series was now established and made her a good living.  It was an exciting idea of a school set abroad, where children of different nationalities and denominations mixed. As time went on, most readers would admit that the quality of writing declined.  In the “Oberland” books, the format tended to be somewhat repetitive, - there was a new girl, usually one who had some family problem, or was “difficult”, coming to the school and learning to fit in... “Becoming a REAL Chalet girl” was how Elinor put it. 

One girl who never quite fit in was Joan Baker in “A problem for the Chalet School”.  Joan is from a working class background, and has “cheap” vulgar ways... However since the school is not meant to be snobbish, it’s not her background that is held against her but her vulgarity and silliness. 

Joan goes to the school because her family has come into some money they won on the Sweeps, but her childhood friend Rosamund Lilley, also from a poor background, has won a scholarship to get there.  Rosamunde “fits in” quite well, though she hasn’t learned any languages prior to going there, and she becomes friends with Len Maynard.  Joan improves up to a point, but is never quite a “real Chalet girl”…Another problem is Joey Bettany/Maynard.  Jo’s connection with the school goes on, somewhat improbably, even after she has left school, married and given birth to an enormous family.  Elinor like some other girls’ writers seemed to see “having large family” as a success for her heroines.   Joey is always living close to the school no matter where it ends up! She always has time for helping out problem girls, though she has her writing, her home and her many children to cope with.
Elinor went on writing the novels, and didn’t seem to become bored with the format... right up to the 1960s.  Her mother had developed health problems and was frequently ill.  After her death, Elinor was in her 60s and she too developed a heart condition.  She was less vigorous and lost some of her zest for life, but her books were still popular and she continued to write, though more slowly.   She was now alone without her mother, and after a while -she decided to move in with a friend Mrs Phyllis Matthewman and her husband, into a house in Surrey. Mrs Matthewman was also a writer.  She, her husband and Elinor were good friends and they bought a house big enough to divide into two flats.  It worked out reasonably well, in that Elinor had some company and someone to keep an eye on her, but Mrs Matthewman did find that her friend intruded on her privacy to an extent.  In 1969, she died, peacefully at home. Her last book, Prefects of the Chalet School, was published after her death. 

Elinor Brent Dyer Part III

Elinor had learned from her mother to keep embarrassing things a secret and she never admitted in discussions about her life, that her father had deserted the family.  She only said that they “lost him” when she was only 3.  
Another tragedy happened when she was 18; her adored younger brother, Henzell died.  He was only 16 and he and Elinor were very close.  But at the time younger people died of illnesses that might now be curable.

Elinor and her mother were desperately grief stricken at his death - but Elinor rarely spoke of it to anyone and they never entirely got over their pain.

 It may be that her portrayals of pupils in the Chalet books (especially Joey) getting very ill or injured and being at Death’s door, and recovering… owe something to the tragedy.

 Hellen McClelland, her biographer, feels that the shock of his death exacerbated Elinor’s tendency to take refuge in fiction or fantasy, rather than the real world…

After a few years working as an unqualified teacher, she decided to go to teacher training college.  She attended the college, in Leeds during World War I, to further her education and improve her chances of finding a good teaching job.  After the death of her father, in 19 – her mother was now free to marry again... And this time Nellie Dyer chose a Mr Septimus Ainsley, who became Elinor’s step father.  Elinor disliked him a lot but as time passed she began to tolerate him.  He was comfortably off and she and Nellie were better off with him in their lives. After a time, she gave up her latest teaching job, to go home and live with him and her mother.  She was writing part time and had had her first Chalet School book published and had begun to have a modest success in writing school stories.

Although she didn’t much like her step father, it seems as if she was willing to give up her independence in order to have more time to write. She had hopes that if she was able to write more books, she would make a decent living, doing something she found most congenial.  Besides, writing was very much her refuge.  She had learned to hide from the problems of real life in her fictional world. 

In 1938, Elinor decided to open her own school, which would give her an income and an occupation for when she wasn’t writing, and also give her freedom to write, as she hoped. Her stepfather’s death had left the 2 women with some money but they were less financially comfortable than when he had bene alive.

Elinor hoped to have a steady income from a school and more independence. Her heroine Madge Bettany had set up a school with little capital and no experience... So it was not untypical of the naïve Elinor that she might have thought she could do as well as the headmistress of the Chalet school had done.

She did after all have teaching experience, and a moderate amount of money.  She bought a large house in Hereford (she and her Mother and stepfather had moved from Newcastle to the warmer climate in the last years of his life).  
She started off, like Madge with 2 pupils. Due to her own “scattiness”, however, the school had a lot of problems and nearly ended up closed before it had well started.  It was called the Margaret Roper School, after the daughter of St Thomas More.  Elinor was not a very organised person and it seemed unlikely that she would be good at the administrative duties of being a headmistress.  When she started out with her 2 pupils, she had taken on a large house which was expensive to run.  The pupils’ mother then found that her daughters were being taught some days by Mrs Ainslie, Elinor’s unqualified mother, and weren’t getting the teaching that they needed.  Elinor was apparently busy with a novel.

Elinor and the Chalet School Part II

Elinor was born to a modest middle class home in Newcastle, and her mother was the second wife of her father who was in the Merchant Marine. They were far from well off, and Dyer had a son from his first wife. the boy wasn’t really part of the second family’s life. 
But Charles Dyers’ second marriage did not last long... it produced two children, Elinor and Henzell, who was younger and delicate.
 Before long, her father left home and separated from his wife. At the time, separation and even more so, divorce was considered scandalous among the middle classes. Charles Dyer seems to have paid his wife some kind of allowance but he was not a very responsible father. Nellie, Elinor’s mother, hid her embarrassment at her desertion by giving people to understand that she was a widow. Many years later, her husband died, having set up house with another woman and had another son with her. Later he unkindly referred to Nellie  in his Will and said that he was leaving nothing to her.
Elinor may have learned something from the experience of her father’s desertion, about “covering up” and preserving an outward appearance of respectability. Her biographer found it hard to write about her because a lot of her life was hidden and not recorded. 
She had to earn a living since she and her mother were not well off and at 18 became an unqualified teacher. There was no legal requirement for a teacher to have certificates or training and many women just went into the job, as governesses or school teachers and read up on subjects before passing their knowledge on to the children.
Like another writer of that time, Dorothy Sayers, she was intelligent but not suited to teaching. Both ladies were in many ways eccentric and unconventional and could not fit into the mould of being an authority figure, and did not enjoy teaching children who were not intelligent or responsive…
Sayers was cleverer than Elinor, and also better educated, being an Oxford graduate. But she too embarrassed her pupils by her enthusiasms and desire to make learning an exciting experience. Soon, Sayers quit teaching because she found it boring and unfulfilling and she found other work. 
Elinor had a childlike side which meant she could get down to a child’s level better -but she found it hard to preserve a distance, she acted eccentrically in the classroom - children and parents found her hard to understand. She was also a very disorganised person and not good at turning up on time…she was enthusiastic about “modern methods” of teaching which were more child friendly than the “learning by rote” practised in the Victorian age… but her own scattiness irritated parents and even pupils. 
Elinor was prone to enthusiasms, and hobbies- and was often very eager about a hobby (or a friendship) in the early stages only to grow bored with it and lose interest. She had many friends, mostly women but she often lost touch with them after a few years. She was passionate about music and the theatre, and about folk dancing, like another school novelist Elsie J Oxenham. 
Elinor was also inclined to exaggerate and tell tall stories, which is another reason why writing a biography was difficult. She amused friends with her “tall tales”, and they learned not to take them too seriously, but Elinor probably believed what she was saying, when she said it. She was a very naïve and innocent person with little self-awareness

Elinor Brent Dyer and the Chalet School Part I

Elinor was born in Newcastle in 1894..She was the author of numerous “girls” books mostly school stories and had an enormous fan base in the UK in the middle years of the 20^th century.

There were many other writers in this field at the time, such Angela Brazil, Elsie Oxenham and Dorita Fairlie Bruce.  In the early 20^th Century, it became increasingly common for middle class girls to go to school, usually boarding school and to receive a better education than they would get from a governess.

So the school story became popular among girls whose families could afford to send them to school and to many girls from poorer families, who couldn’t.  Most of these “girls” writers produced series of books about a particular school and often followed their girl pupils into adulthood.

However Elinor’s books seem to have lasted long and are still popular, whereas the Brazils etc. have become of interest only to collectors and ardent fans.  Even nowadays almost 50 years after her death, there are 2 clubs of fans which take a great interest still in Elinor’s  work.

 One of the novelties about her writing, which gave it a special fillip, was the creation of the Chalet School.  The first in this series - “The School at the Chalet” was published in 1924.  It led to a series of 59 books about a multi lingual school founded by an Englishwoman, in Austria.

 At the time, Elinor had taken a rare holiday abroad and had visited the Tyrol, and realised what a beautiful place it was.  In the post war years, it was quite cheap to live there as the currency was not as strong as the English pound.  So she had the idea of her character Madge Bettany, needing a way to earn a living and look after her delicate young sister Josephine (Joey).  The Bettanys are middle class but not well off. Dick, the only male of the family, is like many young middle class men in the 1920s,  employed in India.  So Madge and Joey need to find somewhere inexpensive to live. 

 Madge decides to go and live in the Tyrol and set up a school.   Its selling point would be that it offered something of an “English education” for continental girls and would also offer English girls the chance to study abroad for moderate fees and to learn foreign languages.  The girls were expected to speak French and German on various days during the week, and were fined for speaking their own languages.  So with this “immersion” method of learning, it helped girls who had had little language training.

  Madge has no teaching experience, but there was no requirement at the time for teachers to be qualified.  She has the assistance of a French friend Mademoiselle Lepattre, who is probably a former governess.  Mlle Lepattre has a young cousin, Simone who (together with Joey) is in need of a good school. Joey and Simone are the first pupils and are sooner joined by some Austrian girls.  The school prospers, and Joey gradually becomes the heroine of the series. 

Like Elinor, she wants to write and becomes an author on leaving school. 

 Another factor in making the Chalet series interesting was the connexion with the “San”.  At the time, the only treatment for TB (for those who could afford it) was rest and care in locations with “mountain air.”  Soon after the foundation of the Chalet School, the Bettany girls meet an English doctor, James Russell, who sets up a Sanatorium for TB sufferers in the Alps.  He and Madge fall in love and she becomes his wife.  She gives up teaching, leaving the school’s management to her partner and co-owner, Mlle Lepattre.

 Joey (like other ex-pupils or mistresses) also finds a husband from the Sanatorium’s staff.  She marries Dr Jack Maynard whose brother is a Chalet school mistress Mollie Maynard or “Maynie”.

 She produces a "long" family of 11 children, including two sets of twins and triplets. 

Unlike some other school story authors, Elinor did not ignore World War II; she had to bring her school back from Austria, when Hitler marched in, and found another location for them, in the Channel Islands.

When the Channel Islands were invaded by Germany, the school had to move again to the UK mainland, near the Welsh border.

Some years later, Elinor found a new and interesting location for her fictional schoolgirls... Due to an outbreak of problems with “drains” in the large house where the school is located, they make a temporary move to an island near Wales, St Briavels.  This gives her the chance to allow the girls to take part in boating and swimming and other water based activities, and to live on an island!  (This is always exciting for young readers).

 However the Chalet School’s owners (Madge now is the head of a “limited company” which manages it) always hoped to go back to the Continent.  So finally in the latter years of the series, the school settles in the Swiss Oberland... where there is a new Sanatorium.  Elinor kept on writing the stories till the end of her life in 1969.

Flann O'Brien Part 1

Brian O’Nolan who wrote under many pen names, most famously as “Flann O’Brien” was born in County Tyrone in 1911. He was an intelligent and talented writer, who was influenced by the experimental fiction of James Joyce.  However unlike Joyce, he remained in Ireland, worked at a conventional career and did not become hostile to the Roman Catholic Church.  He was conservative in many respects.  However, he did dislike and satirise many aspects of post-Independence Ireland, particularly the hypocrisies of the “Gaelic Revival” which promoted the Irish language and Irish “peasant” culture.  The new state, desperate to show that “Ireland was different to and better than” England, tried to give the impression that Irish was still a spoken language, although relatively few people could speak the language and people left the impoverished Gaelic speaking areas as fast as they could, due to a lack of jobs and the terrible poverty.

O’Nolan attended University College Dublin, where he was a prominent member of the Literary and Historical Debating society and where he began his writing career.  In the 1930s he studied German and wrote his first stories. 

Due to family problems, he was left as the sole support of his mother and several siblings and took a job in the Irish Civil Service, which was steady and prestigious employment.  Becuase of his job, he was not supposed to write, without official permission, but he got round this by writing for newspapers and producing fiction under the many pseudonyms that he used.  One was “Myles Na gCopaleen” which he used for his newspaper column.

One of his funniest works was  “An Beal Bocht” or “the Poor Mouth”, which is a satire of the “Irish peasant novel” or autobiography, which tended to emphasize the poverty, hardship and miseries of people living in the west of Ireland.  O’Nolan wrote the parody initially in Irish, and it was translated into English.  He exaggerates all the misery and problems of the “true Irish people”, the smells, the pig in the house etc. etc.. and the book is extremely funny.