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shewhomustA few months ago, when I read - or re-read, who knows? - Robins in the Abbey, I told ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance that the "Abbey School" books were for people who thought that what the Chalet School books needed was a higher emotional intensity and more twins! I was already thinking about an LJ post, but I expected it to be a fairly straightforward piece about childhood reading and adult re-reading, with a smattering of plot summary and the odd one-liner.
Somewhere along the way it has become more complicated, with each new thought twisting what went before in on itself in an ever tightening spiral. My thoughts on the subject have become increasingly snarled up with the difficulties of talking about books you - in the various senses set out by Pierre Bayard in his book on the subject - haven't read. One of the ways he identifies of not having read a book is to have read but forgotten it. I remember very little of the "Abbey School" books that I read as a child: the school at the Abbey, the girls forever exploring the ruins and making discoveries, the emotional force of this connection with the past, which always seems to return to someone called Ambrose (and later the even more dimly remembered Jehane).
I picked up a couple of volumes one midsummer in the bookshop in Berwick: Robins in the Abbey and The New Abbey Girls. Were these among the titles I read as a child? There's no way of knowing. Although I was pretty sure I had one or two volumes of my own, somewhere, I must have read mostly library copies: all I can say is that these didn't ring any bells. If a book is part of a series, can you claim to have read the book if you've only read that book? How many of the series do you need to have read? And does it matter what order you read them in? If so, I failed at the first hurdle: I should have known that anything with 'New' in its name is likely to be very old; The New Abbey Girls is not only the earlier of the two, it's one of the earliest in the series.
Instead I started with Robins in the Abbey, one of the 'Second Generation'* stories. But I'm not altogether sorry to have plunged in a the deep end. Robins in the Abbey begins as if it were a school story, with the arrival of a 'new girl' into a tangle of feuds and resentments: Robin Brent is sailing home from New York**, and is thrown into the company of Lady Joy - and here at last was a name I recognised - although Joy feels that the house in Wales which Robin has inherited from her godfather ought by rights have come to her husband. Joy is able to set this resentment aside, and Robin meets meets Joy's twins, and Maidlin's twins and Rosamund's twins (two sets within a year)... These Abbey girls are young women, and there is no school, though there is the coronation of the year's May Queen, and a tour of the abbey and a discovery (one of the abbey's bells, long-lost).
It was a relief to peel away the years and turn to The New Abbey Girls, away from all this maternity: the book begins the day after Joan's wedding, and Joy and Jen are no longer schoolgirls. But Maidlin and Rosamund, the eponymous 'new' girls, go to Miss Macy's school - because, of course, there never was a school at the abbey, my memory had simply edited a series of books about girls growing up with a particular location at its heart, and made that location into a school. The publishers can't have been averse to this: my copy of Robins in the Abbey (Collins, 1959) has 'The Abbey School Series' impressed on the cover, around an image of the abbey.
There's no school, but there are classes. How could I have forgotten something as central to the books as the dancing? It is present in Robins in the Abbey, but eclipsed by the romantic plot, and the constant need to introduce characters by their lineage (information about who was the mother of each young woman, and who she has named her babies after, all of interest to the returning readership). In The New Abbey Girls, dancing comes into the foreground: when Joy is uncertain what do do, she goes to London to visit her friends in what is evidently the English Folk Dance (not yet 'Dance and Song') Society. 'Country dancing' as we learned it as school was one of the few elements of PE that I actually enjoyed, and the descriptions of the dances are so lively, and their names so bizarrely wonderful, how could I have blanked this so completely?
Perhaps the problem was that if you think you are reading a school story, the presence of something so big and so powerful pulls the narrative all out of shape. It requires a readjustment of expectations to get any sort of grip on what the books are about. If I'd stopped - as I might have done - after these two books, I still wouldn't have got there. But I brought The Abbey Girls in Town home fromdesperance's house clearance; and because I was reading that, I reacted to gillpolack's remark about reading the first book of the series by poking around the internet; and there I found information to make me pay attention to what I was reading: which was, of course, a fascinating account of the early days of the EFDS, including some portraits of real people - Madam, and the Pixie, for example (and the Writer Person, a self-portrait).
There is a strong emphasis on dancing as a conduit for doing good works. The Abbey girls are genuinely thrilled and delighted by the activity of dancing, for its own sake. As Ju Gosling says, "It is hard to imagine today how daring and liberating it must have felt for the women students to dance in gym tunics, in a world where women still wore ankle-length dresses for everything else and where other forms of dance were excessively formal." But the classes are also a form of outreach to the poor children of East London, part of the Settlement movement. In The New Abbey Girls, Joy is shocked at the misery of the East End, "the crowded streets, and the unemployed men standing at the corners, the squalid houses, the mud and dirt and bustle", and asks the Pixie what 'people like us' ought to do for the people who live there.
In The Abbey Girls in Town, published a couple of years later, she has started to act on what she has seen. Ruth, arriving from South Africa to stay with cousins she does not know, is puzzled that the hitherto staid and stodgy Mary has begun to write lively little stories about a fairy godmother who whisks poor children off for a magical day in the country. Mary has come to life through the transforming power of dance, but also through the generosity of Joy Shirley, who gives her pretty gifts and refuses to accept a donation from Mary's fee for her writing for "the cripples' play-hour at the big club in the East End" - "But Joy didn't need it; she's got tons."
She has indeed, and I find Elsie J. Oxenham's emphasis on material and social success sits oddly alongside this quasi-missionary theme. Joy has 'tons' of money and inherits her grandfather's house, but not the abbey which he leaves to Joan (who presumably has the means to maintain it). Robin inherits the Quellyn Estate, Maidlin is an heiress, Rosamund marries and becomes the Countess of Kentisbury, Ruth's family are able to give up farming when they discover diamonds on their land in South Africa. This last no longer gives the innocent pleasure it was intended to, but it's just the cherry on top of a very indigestible cake.
At this point I made two further discoveries. First, I climbed the ladder to the top shelf, and found where my Abbey books were hiding: I have copies of Stowaways in The Abbey, Maid of The Abbey and a very thick volume of The Abbey Girls in Town. At the same time I found among the Elsie J. Oxenham Society's FAQs one further way in which I had not read these books. The question What is the Difference between the Children's Press editions and other copies of the Abbey Titles? receives the answer that the most serious fault of the Children's Press editions is that they are so abridged that reading the two editions side by side is like reading two different books. Well, I'll have the chance to find out for myself, because the copy of The Abbey Girls in Town which I have already read is the Children's Press edition, and the one I haven't, isn't. (My copy of The New Abbey Girls is Children's Press, too. Ah, well).
I feel - and not entirely in a bad way - that I have more to read now than when I started; and that was before my copy of Girls of the Hamlet Club, the first of the series, arrived in the post!
*Chronology established by the Elsie J. Oxenham Society.
**I don't remember being aware how old these books were, when I first read them. Perhaps it just wasn't something I noticed; certainly I was surprised when I saw that the first of the series was published in 1914. Robins in the Abbey was published in 1947, and Robin arrives from New York by liner (as Ruth had from South Africa, in 1925 in The Abbey Girls in Town - but I'll get to that); her father is injured in a plane crash in Lisbon, and her mother mother flies out to be with him, and all this flying is a very big deal.
desperance that the "Abbey School" books were for people who thought that what the Chalet School books needed was a higher emotional intensity and more twins! I was already thinking about an LJ post, but I expected it to be a fairly straightforward piece about childhood reading and adult re-reading, with a smattering of plot summary and the odd one-liner.Somewhere along the way it has become more complicated, with each new thought twisting what went before in on itself in an ever tightening spiral. My thoughts on the subject have become increasingly snarled up with the difficulties of talking about books you - in the various senses set out by Pierre Bayard in his book on the subject - haven't read. One of the ways he identifies of not having read a book is to have read but forgotten it. I remember very little of the "Abbey School" books that I read as a child: the school at the Abbey, the girls forever exploring the ruins and making discoveries, the emotional force of this connection with the past, which always seems to return to someone called Ambrose (and later the even more dimly remembered Jehane).
I picked up a couple of volumes one midsummer in the bookshop in Berwick: Robins in the Abbey and The New Abbey Girls. Were these among the titles I read as a child? There's no way of knowing. Although I was pretty sure I had one or two volumes of my own, somewhere, I must have read mostly library copies: all I can say is that these didn't ring any bells. If a book is part of a series, can you claim to have read the book if you've only read that book? How many of the series do you need to have read? And does it matter what order you read them in? If so, I failed at the first hurdle: I should have known that anything with 'New' in its name is likely to be very old; The New Abbey Girls is not only the earlier of the two, it's one of the earliest in the series.
Instead I started with Robins in the Abbey, one of the 'Second Generation'* stories. But I'm not altogether sorry to have plunged in a the deep end. Robins in the Abbey begins as if it were a school story, with the arrival of a 'new girl' into a tangle of feuds and resentments: Robin Brent is sailing home from New York**, and is thrown into the company of Lady Joy - and here at last was a name I recognised - although Joy feels that the house in Wales which Robin has inherited from her godfather ought by rights have come to her husband. Joy is able to set this resentment aside, and Robin meets meets Joy's twins, and Maidlin's twins and Rosamund's twins (two sets within a year)... These Abbey girls are young women, and there is no school, though there is the coronation of the year's May Queen, and a tour of the abbey and a discovery (one of the abbey's bells, long-lost).
It was a relief to peel away the years and turn to The New Abbey Girls, away from all this maternity: the book begins the day after Joan's wedding, and Joy and Jen are no longer schoolgirls. But Maidlin and Rosamund, the eponymous 'new' girls, go to Miss Macy's school - because, of course, there never was a school at the abbey, my memory had simply edited a series of books about girls growing up with a particular location at its heart, and made that location into a school. The publishers can't have been averse to this: my copy of Robins in the Abbey (Collins, 1959) has 'The Abbey School Series' impressed on the cover, around an image of the abbey.
There's no school, but there are classes. How could I have forgotten something as central to the books as the dancing? It is present in Robins in the Abbey, but eclipsed by the romantic plot, and the constant need to introduce characters by their lineage (information about who was the mother of each young woman, and who she has named her babies after, all of interest to the returning readership). In The New Abbey Girls, dancing comes into the foreground: when Joy is uncertain what do do, she goes to London to visit her friends in what is evidently the English Folk Dance (not yet 'Dance and Song') Society. 'Country dancing' as we learned it as school was one of the few elements of PE that I actually enjoyed, and the descriptions of the dances are so lively, and their names so bizarrely wonderful, how could I have blanked this so completely?
Perhaps the problem was that if you think you are reading a school story, the presence of something so big and so powerful pulls the narrative all out of shape. It requires a readjustment of expectations to get any sort of grip on what the books are about. If I'd stopped - as I might have done - after these two books, I still wouldn't have got there. But I brought The Abbey Girls in Town home from
desperance's house clearance; and because I was reading that, I reacted to gillpolack's remark about reading the first book of the series by poking around the internet; and there I found information to make me pay attention to what I was reading: which was, of course, a fascinating account of the early days of the EFDS, including some portraits of real people - Madam, and the Pixie, for example (and the Writer Person, a self-portrait).There is a strong emphasis on dancing as a conduit for doing good works. The Abbey girls are genuinely thrilled and delighted by the activity of dancing, for its own sake. As Ju Gosling says, "It is hard to imagine today how daring and liberating it must have felt for the women students to dance in gym tunics, in a world where women still wore ankle-length dresses for everything else and where other forms of dance were excessively formal." But the classes are also a form of outreach to the poor children of East London, part of the Settlement movement. In The New Abbey Girls, Joy is shocked at the misery of the East End, "the crowded streets, and the unemployed men standing at the corners, the squalid houses, the mud and dirt and bustle", and asks the Pixie what 'people like us' ought to do for the people who live there.
In The Abbey Girls in Town, published a couple of years later, she has started to act on what she has seen. Ruth, arriving from South Africa to stay with cousins she does not know, is puzzled that the hitherto staid and stodgy Mary has begun to write lively little stories about a fairy godmother who whisks poor children off for a magical day in the country. Mary has come to life through the transforming power of dance, but also through the generosity of Joy Shirley, who gives her pretty gifts and refuses to accept a donation from Mary's fee for her writing for "the cripples' play-hour at the big club in the East End" - "But Joy didn't need it; she's got tons."
She has indeed, and I find Elsie J. Oxenham's emphasis on material and social success sits oddly alongside this quasi-missionary theme. Joy has 'tons' of money and inherits her grandfather's house, but not the abbey which he leaves to Joan (who presumably has the means to maintain it). Robin inherits the Quellyn Estate, Maidlin is an heiress, Rosamund marries and becomes the Countess of Kentisbury, Ruth's family are able to give up farming when they discover diamonds on their land in South Africa. This last no longer gives the innocent pleasure it was intended to, but it's just the cherry on top of a very indigestible cake.
At this point I made two further discoveries. First, I climbed the ladder to the top shelf, and found where my Abbey books were hiding: I have copies of Stowaways in The Abbey, Maid of The Abbey and a very thick volume of The Abbey Girls in Town. At the same time I found among the Elsie J. Oxenham Society's FAQs one further way in which I had not read these books. The question What is the Difference between the Children's Press editions and other copies of the Abbey Titles? receives the answer that the most serious fault of the Children's Press editions is that they are so abridged that reading the two editions side by side is like reading two different books. Well, I'll have the chance to find out for myself, because the copy of The Abbey Girls in Town which I have already read is the Children's Press edition, and the one I haven't, isn't. (My copy of The New Abbey Girls is Children's Press, too. Ah, well).
I feel - and not entirely in a bad way - that I have more to read now than when I started; and that was before my copy of Girls of the Hamlet Club, the first of the series, arrived in the post!
*Chronology established by the Elsie J. Oxenham Society.
**I don't remember being aware how old these books were, when I first read them. Perhaps it just wasn't something I noticed; certainly I was surprised when I saw that the first of the series was published in 1914. Robins in the Abbey was published in 1947, and Robin arrives from New York by liner (as Ruth had from South Africa, in 1925 in The Abbey Girls in Town - but I'll get to that); her father is injured in a plane crash in Lisbon, and her mother mother flies out to be with him, and all this flying is a very big deal.
