L.T. Meade (1844–1914)

Bedad! L.T. Meade explores the idea of the "Wild Irish Girl" with a vengeance in this school story from 1902, which sees the vivacious, high-spirited, rule-breaking Kathleen O'Hara come to England to attend the Great Shirley School. With four hundred pupils, the school is divided between one hundred "Foundationers," who are from poorer backgrounds, and are allowed to attend the school for free, and some three hundred non-foundation girls, who are paying pupils. The tensions between the two groups - the non-foundationers look down on the Foundation girls, who feel resentful in return - are exacerbated by Kathleen, who has been allowed to roam free at her grandfather's castle in Ireland, and who has no notion of or respect for English class divisions or school rules. Although rooming with the family of Alice Tennant, who is a non-foundation girl, she chooses her friends from amongst the Foundation girls, and forms a secret society, which she calls "The Wild Irish Girls." This leads to quite a bit of trouble, not just for Kathleen, who will not be materially harmed by it, but for the girls who are her supposed friends, and whose social position is more precarious than hers. Eventually, after much sturm and drang, Kathleen's rebellion is quashed, and in a very brief conclusion, all is resolved amicably...

A late-19th-century author of Anglo-Irish background, L.T. Meade grew up in County Cork, before moving to London as a young woman and launching a career writing children's books, mysteries, historical adventures, and sentimental romances. She penned over three hundred books, a number of which - The Rebel of the School, Wild Kitty, A Wild Irish Girl, etc. - featured the kind of "Wild Irish Girl" character (or caricature, if one prefers) seen here. This type - the free-spirited, often poetic, always emotional girl, who has trouble conforming to the stricter social rules of English society, but nevertheless has a heart of gold, and some emotional wisdom to share with her English peers - can be traced back to Sydney Owenson's 1806 The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, which features a romance between a dissolute English nobleman, and the daughter of a dispossessed Gaelic prince. There is an interesting article by Carole Dunbar on the use of the type in the work of L.T. Meade and Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey in Studies in Children's Literature, 1500-2000. I understand that more recently, Sandra McAvoy's "The 'Wild Irish Girl' in Selected Novels of L.T. Meade" appeared in Adolescence in Modern Irish History. I would imagine that the use of the type here, and the book's connection to Ireland, explains why The Rebel of the School was chosen for our syllabus, in the class on the history of children's literature that I took, while getting my masters at an Irish university.

Despite finding all of this interesting, from a literary and social history perspective, I found that I did not enjoy reading The Rebel of the School. It was not my first book from Meade - before taking my masters, I had read A World of Girls and The Girls of St. Wode's - so I was expecting the style of writing, and the sometimes divided plot-lines. What I wasn't expecting was to find the main character so thoroughly annoying. I recall reading this, in my university library, and texting one of my masters cohort afterward, to say that if Kathleen had said the word 'bedad' one more time, I might have chucked the book across the room. It isn't just the showy "Irishness" here, that felt over the top and stereotypically "stage Irish" to me, it was the fact that Kathleen is so oblivious to the welfare and real feelings of her so-called friends, leading them into situations that could be very damaging for them, perhaps even imperil their ability to get an education, and therefore, possible ability to prosper economically. It irritated me to see the author depict her as somehow loving, when it is so clear that her actions are driven by her own desires and feelings, and are entirely inward-looking. It was particularly troubling to see this quality of obliviousness, or indifference to the good of others, set down to some kind of "Irish" nature. Finally, I found the conclusion, which is terribly rushed, completely unconvincing. It felt as if, having created a mess through her character, Meade ran out of time and energy to untangle the snarled plot-lines of her story, and just decided to end it with a kind of one-page "and it all turned out well" declaration.

I'm not sure I would highly recommend this one, unless it be to the determined fan of Meade, who does have her devotees, or to the reader interested in the 'Wild Irish Girl' character in children's fiction.… (meer)

He brought out his microscope, which I saw, to my delight, was of the latest design, and I set to work at once, while he watched me with evident interest. At last the crucial moment came, and I bent over the instrument and adjusted the focus on my preparation. My suspicions were only too well confirmed by which I had extracted what I saw.

I previously read an excerpt from The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings in rel="nofollow" target="_top">The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, but the whole thing is on Project Gutenberg. Brotherhood is actually very similar to Sorceress: a scientific man keeps running into the dastardly plans of a scientific woman taking London by storm, a woman both beautiful and vaguely occult. Brotherhood was serialized (in The Strand), but it's somewhere between a Charles Dickens novel and a Sherlock Holmes story. It's not one big story like a Dickens serial, but it's not a string of standalones like Doyle's Holmes stories.

Rather, Norman Head (who studied physiology at Cambridge, but never qualified, and now does it out of sheer love) has a different encounter with some agent of Madame Koluchy's in each story. Sometimes he wins, sometime Koluchy wins, and the stories gradually chart their battle. It's like one of those tv series where the same bad guy is behind every plot, and sometime the situation changes, but mostly it remains static until the season finale.

The stories are decent, if not great. Meade over-depends on characters giving long backstory dumps to one another, which sucks the tension out of some tales, but other I enjoyed. Most stories have some kind of scientific conceit at their heart, making them borderline science fiction or maybe technothrillers-- people killed with new disease strains, or burglars using pendulums, or a temperature-triggered explosive, or x-rays used as a weapon. (The book has a co-writing credit for Robert Eustance; Janis Dawson's introduction to Sorceress says this is Robert Eustace Barton, who provided Meade with medical/scientific information while she wrote the stories herself [19].)

Madame Koluchy herself is kind of the best part. She's barely in the stories, usually working through agents, but that makes her all the more captivating. She's supposedly a scientist, and she does indeed invent things, but this is mostly what we're told about her. When we are actually shown her, her effect is more occult; she pulls people into her orbit with her beauty, and grants them what they desire if they help her advance the power of the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Boring old Norman Head (and his lawyer friend) are hardly worthy adversaries; Head used to be a member of the Brotherhood and in love with Koluchy, but it's hard to imagine this. A version of this with more Madame Koluchy, and more consistently intriguing and varied plots, would be a good book, but as it is, we have a pedestrian one with occasional flashes of interest.… (meer)

The rather drab dustjacket does what it is paid for on this volume. it washes its face. It keeps the real cover pretty pristine and there to see behind it is the pretty girl, long curly hair in tresses, straw hat - and what is that in her hand - a whip? There is a chapter called 'Doing a wilful deed'. It is quite serious though page 129: 'If to be a New Woman means being well educated, and taking an interest in life, and seeing plenty of my fellow men and women, then I am going to become one', said Barbara stoutly.… (meer)

"There is no doubt that she is very clever. She knows a little bit of everything, and has wonderful recipes with regard to medicines, surgery, and dentistry. She is a most lovely woman herself, very fair, with blue eyes, an innocent, childlike manner, and quantities of rippling gold hair. [...] This woman deals in all sorts of curious, secrets, but principally in cosmetics. Her shop in the Strand could, I fancy, tell many a strange history. Her clients go there, and she does what is necessary for them." (120)

L. T. Meade was a force to be reckoned with in the British magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She wrote many recurring features, kind of like Sherlock Holmes. This Broadview edition collects single installments from Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1893-95), The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898), and The Heart of a Mystery (1901), as well as all six installments of The Sorceress of the Strand (1902-03). There's a lot of medicine and/or science in the stories collected here: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor is about the weird crimes a doctor discovers in the course of his medical duties, while the villain of The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is an evil, female Italian chemist who works for a secret society, while The Sorceress of the Strand is about an amateur chemist who works doing insurance investigations who ends up repeatedly encountering one Madame Sara, an evil surgeon/physician/dentist (described in the above quotation). Ostensibly these stories are about science, but science in the world of L. T. Meade has a very occult register: there's a lot of hypnotism and gothic overtones in these stories.

They're fun enough, but not terribly amazing. A little repetitive in that Madame Sara always has some incredibly convoluted plot-- in one, she makes a woman metal teeth so she can attack someone but people will think it was a wolf-- for which there often seems to be a supernatural explanation, but the dogged investigations of Dixon (the insurance investigator) and his friend Vandeleur (a police surgeon) always make it clear it's Madame Sara's tricks at the root of it all. Sara has scientific powers, but is no scientist, I would say-- the title "sorceress" given to her by the serial's title is much more appropriate. I couldn't help but feel, though, that The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings sounded more interesting than The Sorceress of the Strand, and wished we'd got the former in its entirety and just an excerpt of the latter. Still, thank goodness that Broadview opted to reprint even just a limited selection of these long-forgotten tales.… (meer)