‘The School At The Chalet’ by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer has been on my ‘to be read’ list for a few years now and what better time to finally get around to it than with this centenary reissue by the Girls Gone By imprint. In many respects I am very, very far from the target audience for a one hundred year old children’s book about a fee-paying girls’ school in the idyllic Austrian mountains, not least because after a thirty year professional career working in state education, the very idea of private schooling can still make me prickle. So yes, the fact that the characters are for the most part upper middle class and ‘privileged’ can occasionally be an irritant but it is also true to say that as with, for example, Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine adventures (whose reissued books brought me to Girls Gone By in the first place) this ought not to out one off investigating. Besides, it would be churlish to judge (and/or dismiss) such fictional worlds according to one’s contemporary standards for to do so would be to miss opportunities to learn about historical contexts. In terms of education for example it can be very easy for those of my own generation to really grasp the idea that education should NOT be provided free of charge by the State for all young people, or that girls should not (at least notionally) have learning opportunities equal to boys. One could of course argue long and hard about the ways in which UK (and perhaps specifically English) education policy in the past fifty years has made things better (or indeed worse) for those from backgrounds of reduced capital (financial and, increasingly perhaps more relevant, cultural) but this is hardly the time or place. Instead, whilst one perhaps does need to park a sense of class consciousness in order to enjoy a book like ‘The School At The Chalet’ equally one can also use it as an opportunity to consider people as characters defined by qualities other than social class.

Indeed, using the context of a school and characters who are for the most part children can be an excellent means of questioning the very rigidity of the social class structures prevalent in 1925. The realm of the Girls’ School novel is largely alien to me, but I do think that for example Mabel Esther Allan’s ’School on Skye’ books from the 1950s certainly seek to challenge such notions even whilst operating within their constraints. One thing that certainly strikes me about ‘The School At The Chalet’ is the way in which the school grows so rapidly immediately upon its opening. It feels like this reflects an appetite, at least within some of the middle classes, for girls’ educational opportunities previously lacking.
Having said that, it must also be admitted that the curriculum at The Chalet School does seem to be lacking in mathematics and the sciences, with much time given over to the ‘Finishing School’ staple of languages, music and sewing. Still, small steps and perhaps later books in the extensive series see the curriculum expand to embrace more ‘boyish’ subjects?

Structurally, ‘The School At The Chalet’ is episodic with each chapter or small cluster of chapters covering a series of events throughout the school’s first year. Sometimes these are Grand Adventures, such as getting caught in the mountains during a thunderstorm and having to spend the night in a herdsman’s hut. Oftentimes, however, the ‘episodes’ are relatively everyday events that allow the many individual characters to develop. A somewhat myriad cast of characters threatens at times to overwhelm things, but the focus just about stays on the few with whom the story begins, these being the school’s ‘owner’/principle Madge Bettany, her young sister Jo and her friend from Cornwall (where they set off from) Grizel Cochrane. In many respects the book is about Grizel coming to terms with the fact that she is rejected by her father and step-mother (Madge and Jo appear to have been orphaned at quite a young age although it is not explored in detail in this book), neither of whom seem to want Grizel spoiling their opportunities for fun and this exploration of behaviour does add a layer of interest to the book that might otherwise be lacking. Indeed Brent-Dyer revisits this theme with the introduction of another character, Juliet, who is even more brutally abandoned into the Chalet School’s care by her parents. There is surely an element here about not judging children based on their parents’ social class and/or financial status and something also about emotional states being blind to material ‘worth’. Equally, I am willing to concede that this is a ridiculously intellectual reading of something intended solely as escapist fantasy for children, something which is surely borne out by the somewhat rushed ending to the book in which Madge, Jo and Grizel each find themselves in comically thrilling situations that tumble to a conclusion without barely a pause for breath much like this sentence in fact.

The real star of ‘The School At The Chalet’ however is the landscape of the Northern Tyrolean Alps and specifically the area around the Achensee. Indeed, it was apparently a holiday to the lakeside village of Pertisau in 1922 that inspired Brent-Dyor to begin her Chalet School odyssey and her love of the landscape and people of the area are certainly marvellously captured. There is a small degree of negativity about foreigners, but this seems specifically targeted at Germans, and ‘Prussians’ in particular in the form of the ‘Frau Berlin’ character who pops up a couple of times in the story. Given the proximity of the book’s writing to the First World War, however, any anti-German feeling is lightweight and pretty much restricted to ‘Frau Berlin’ which makes one think that perhaps this is more of an urban/rural observation than anything rooted in geographical borders. Incidentally, ’Frau Berlin’ for some reason reminds me of The Bellinger in Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine stories and it is perhaps worth remarking that Saville’s outing to Austria in his 1950 ‘Jillies’ adventure ‘The Sign Of The Alpine Rose’ displays significantly more xenophobic attitudes in its English characters than those in ’The School At The Chalet’.

I understand that Brent-Dyer once acknowledged the fact that she was “no ‘great’ writer” and certainly ‘The School At The Chalet’ would seem to bear this out. Its appeal, however, would seem to lie (as with Enid Blyton, perhaps) not in any sense of literary excellence but in an intuitive knack for understanding what girls wanted (or arguably what a patriarchal society encouraged them to want) from fiction. As much as those on the ultra-conservative leaning edges of society today might welcome a wholesale return of the kind of educational focus seen in the early 20th Century, it is very doubtful indeed that many teenage girls would find much of interest in ‘The School At The Chalet’ in 2025. Indeed, for some time now (at a rough guess, the last 30 years?) the readership of the book, which has never been out of print, must assuredly be in the category of ’heritage readership’. That readership must surely too be passing from those who discovered books like this in their own childhood and who read them now for purposes of nostalgia and comfort into an audience who have no such connection of emotional memory. For them, amongst whom I certainly count myself, the appeal is… well, what exactly? A peek into social and historical contexts from Before Our Time and an opportunity to spot the things that time and history do not touch (or at least just lightly kiss)? Or perhaps something simpler and in fact more in tune with their avowed intent: fantasy escapism into fictional realms devoid of connection to the harsh realities of the present day. Either way, whilst I do not feel the need to obsessively start reading the entire (and extensive) ‘Chalet School’ series, I do certainly see myself dipping a toe into Brent-Dyer’s pleasurably sketched waters of the Achensee in the future.