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.