News from Nowhere

Berrydin Books of Berwick seems to have a source of Elsie J. Oxenham titles; it's the only secondhand bookshop where I ever find them, and reasonably priced, too - which is odd, because although it's a shop I enjoy visiting, I rarely buy anything else there. Last summer's haul was three volumes, bought because they were the ones on offer, and I am currently binge-reading them. Between them they stake out the territory of the series very neatly. They all have the magic word 'abbey' in the title, but only one is actually concerned with the Abbey itself. Jen of the Abbey School allows the Abbey series to intersect with the Rocklands School series, The Abbey Girls Win Through is concerned with "the Abbey Girls" as they grow up, and its heart is at the Hall as much as at the Abbey. Only Secrets of the Abbey is as I remembered the books from my childhood reading, with thrilling discoveries to be made at the Abbey itself: how significant is it that this is one of the 'retrospective titles', in which Oxenham returned to the adventures when younger of charaters whose lives she has already mapped beyond this point?

( Jen of the Abbey School )

( The Abbey Girls Win Through )

( Secrets of the Abbey )

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( The inevitable footnotes )

As I discovered when I plunged back into the world of the Abbey School, there was (barring a temporary aberration) no school at the abbey. And in the very first book in the series, there was no abbey, either. Elsie J. Oxenham's Girls of the Hamlet Club describes the founding of the eponymous club, which plays a large part throughout the series, with its folk dancing and its May Queens. ( A ridiculously long post on the subject )

( With many footnotes )