Realism and Romance – one hundred years of the Chalet School

1925 saw the publication of some remarkable, enduring classic novels – The Great Gatsby, Mrs Dalloway – and The School at the Chalet. My own forthcoming eleventh novel is set in 1925, and one of my favourite bits of the story was when one of the characters is given The School at the Chalet. I thought a History Girls post on one hundred years of the series would be very timely. 

The Fernside girls read The School at the Chalet

But surely The History Girls is meant to be more … erudite? More serious? Not the place to celebrate an essentially trivial genre. 

Well, here’s what happens in one of the books. Judge for yourselves if you think it's trivial. 

A benign community of women and girls, which has existed peacefully for some years, is threatened when the country is annexed by a neighbouring fascist state. The girls incur the authorities’ wrath and have to flee for their lives. Their community is destroyed but rises again, smaller but undaunted, in another country, and they pledge themselves to peace and internationalism, though their individual countries are now at war. And nobody knows yet that the safe island they have chosen for sanctuary is about to be invaded…

When the story is published, the book’s cover is so controversial that it is withdrawn and a new, less offensive version substituted.

Sounds like a modern dystopia?

The original cover 

In fact, this is the plot of The Chalet School In Exile (1940), the fourteenth in the series of 59 books published between 1925 and 1970. Not all the books are so dramatic; not all keep such faith with the harsh realities of the real world in which they were written, but the series as a whole is a remarkable achievement. It’s not a packaged series, such as Nancy Drew – all the books are the work of one author, Elinor M. Brent-Dyer.

replacement cover -- adventurous, but the Nazis are 
no longer in the drawing room

The imaginative space of the Chalet School occupies a huge place in my reading life. The locations – Austria, Guernsey, the English/Welsh borders, a Welsh island and eventually Switzerland – are lush, and the characters, girls and teachers, are allowed to develop in a way that a shorter series can’t allow for. The books are romantic, but have their own realism too – a girl can be picking Edelweiss and ragging her chums in one book, and grieving for her father, killed in a Nazi concentration camp, in the next.

my Chalet collection 

 

In the 1980s, when I discovered them, the series was still in print in paperback, though the whole series was never available at one time. I read what I could find in the library and local bookshops, ridiculously out of sequence, so that in one book the character Jo is a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, in the next she is the mother of eleven children, in the next she is back at school and Head Girl. Confusing for ten-year-old me, but also very exciting, because, unlike the Malory Towers or St Clare’s books, which each contained six books and followed one or two main characters, the Chalet School is itself the central character of this saga. I had the vague sense – especially when I found some old 1920s hardbacks – that this was a big, big world, and that there was much more to discover.                     

And I kept on discovering. Unlike many readers, I never felt embarrassed by the fact that I was still reading school stories in my teens. I remember, at university in Durham, finding two early hardbacks in a charity shop and happily buying them despite my boyfriend’s incredulity. (The books lasted longer than the boyfriend.) When I did a PhD on girls’ schools and colleges in modern fiction, I had the perfect excuse to keep on reading them and call it research.

My PhD book 

As you would expect in any series lasting for 45 years and 59 books, the quality is patchy, and some of the later books are formulaic and repetitive. And from the fifties onwards, the books don’t really keep pace with the changes in society. That is, there is mention of space travel and Beatniks but the prevailing attitudes are essentially conservative and old-fashioned. One imagines the writer growing increasingly out of step with the modern world and perhaps herself seeking refuge in the more-or-less unchanging values of her fictional school. When I first read the books, I probably rather sneered at this: surely it was her duty to reflect the world around her? Now in my fifties myself, and feeling much more at home writing historical fiction than trying to make sense of 2025, I have rather more sympathy. 

Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

Will the Chalet School survive another hundred years? The books are kept in print by Girls Gone By, a small press which reissues titles regularly, and there are two flourishing fan clubs, The New Chalet Club and Friends of the Chalet School but it would be fair to say that these are not sisterhoods of the young. The books are old-fashioned now, and yet at their heart is a celebration of friendship, female space, and tolerance which doesn’t grow old.