Dorothy Dennison (1899–1978)

The Sixth Form at St. Eldred's High School go to Brittany for an educational holiday in this engaging tale from Dorothy Dennison. Headmistress Miss Roberts, anxious to improve the school's showing in the Warburton History Prize, which is to be awarded that year to the best essay on the history of a French city, sends her girls to the small village of Plougastrel, on the Côtes-du-Nord (present-day Côtes-d'Armor). Here they stay with the poor but friendly M. Solle, a local Protestant minister, and his family, leading a simple life. They travel into nearby Tréguier, a medieval city dating to the 6th century, which is to be the subject of their essays. They also have plenty of entertaining adventures in the countryside around Plougastrel and on the shore, and return home reluctantly, naming it the best holiday ever. Shirley, the best scholar of the Sixth Form, ends up writing a terrific essay, and wins the Warburton Prize...

The second book I have read from Dorothy Dennison, after her Rumours in the Fourth Form, The Sixth Form Goes Abroad is part school story and part holiday adventure. It is an entertaining and engaging example of both, and Dennison creates sympathetic characters that involve the reader in their story. This is a fairly lighthearted book, and doesn't have any of the tension of Rumours in the Fourth Form, which featured family secrets quite prominently. I appreciated the enthusiasm that Dennison displayed for her subject, and her evident love for the area of Brittany in which she set her story. Some of the descriptions made me want to travel to Tréguier myself. There is a Christian theme throughout, as there is in most of Dennison's work, and I thought the discussion of beliefs, between chaperone Aunt Sally and Form Captain Pat Stewart toward the close of the book was interesting. Dennison was an author in the Evangelistic line, but unlike some other authors in the genre that I have read, those beliefs never overwhelm the story. Rather, they feel like a natural extension and part of the narrative. This is a difficult book to track down, but if one can lay hold of it, I would recommend it for fans of the British girls' school story and/or holiday adventure tale.… (meer)

Originally published in 1925, Rumours in the Fourth Form is the story of Rosemary Aston, who comes to Rothermere High School as a new girl, and finds that some of her fellow pupils, particularly the clique led by snooty Natalia Foreman, seem hostile to her. What Rosemary does not know, because her mother had deliberately kept her ignorant of the fact, is that her father - an Englishman who lived for many years in Lucerne, Switerland, where she herself was born and raised - was widely believed to be a thief, one who committed suicide after his shady dealings brought his business down, and that this fact had come to be common knowledge at Rothermere, thanks to Natalia, who overheard headmistress Miss Loughton making reference to it, and did some investigating of her own. Although Rosemary soon has her own coterie of devoted friends, from mischievous Gwen Forrester to merry May Bryant (known as "Matches," because of her fiery hair), the damage done by malicious gossip can not be completely undone, and she is made desperately unhappy by Natalia's (inevitable) revelations. Was Rosemary's father truly a thief and suicide? Would she have to live in that shadow all her life? Most of all, when Rosemary, in a moment of weakness, does wrong herself, will she have the strength to put it right...?

This girls' school story from Dorothy Dennison is an interesting example of the genre, as it straddles the line between the earlier Victorian school story tradition, in which religious conversion and conviction play such an important role, and the newer developments of the interwar years, in which concerns about schoolgirl honor become paramount, supplanting spiritual matters such as sin, redemption and Christian fellowship. On the one hand, honor is explicitly made an issue from the very beginning of the book, as Natalia's actions, in listening to a private conversation, are debated by the girls of the Fourth Form. On the other hand, the resolution of Rosemary's crisis comes through a Sunday Bible class to which Gwen invites her, and during which she experiences a religious conversion. Her efforts to make restitution for the wrong she has done are couched in explicitly Christian terms, as is the final denouement in her ongoing conflict with Natalia. Dennison is apparently a writer in the evangelistic mode, so I believe her subsequent stories retained the religious themes that were no longer common, in the rest of the genre, but the appearance of concerns about "honour" (as opposed to Christian virtue) here, does point to the changes occurring in the wider world of British children's literature.

That tension, between older and newer themes in the school story genre, gives Rumours in the Fourth Form, which has a foot in each world, an interesting feeling. If the resolution to the story was somewhat improbable - coincidence piled upon coincidence, with all troubles being miraculously resolved, through a sort of deus-ex-machina - it was still a pleasant little read, especially for those with an interest in the genre. Recommended primarily to readers with a strong interest in school stories.… (meer)