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