Resources

What resources have you come across for information about the Chalet School books? I have The Chalet School Companion by Helen McClelland. It has a brief biography of Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, information on school locations and history, and various other tidbits. Personally, I could live without the fanfiction-type interludes, but overall it's fairly useful.

There seem to be several websites devoted to the Chalet School. Which are the best ones? What kind of information do they provide?

The Friends of the Chalet School site is very good. It has useful information about EBD and the books' locations, as well as details of the different editions including which are abridged and how badly. I belong to FOCS and highly recommend membership; even if you are not able to join a RL group for meetups, the magazine contains ongoing conversation-style discussions of various CS and related topics, as well as articles and stories written by members.

Behind the Chalet School is the only (?) biography of the author, and considered to be essential reading (although I haven't read it myself yet!).

The Chalet Club newsletters are amusing to read if you can find the collection; it is facsimilies of the newsletters that EBD wrote for the fan club members at the same time as she was writing the books.

The series is discussed in more general books about childrens and girlsown literature; I particularly like You're a brick Angela which is a broad survery of books for girls, and quite critical in places but an enjoyable read. A world of girls is another good one.

Does anyone have The Chalet School Encyclopaedia, Volume One? Is it good? Is there a Volume Two yet?

Sylvia, I went to Foyles bookshop last night, as they had the CS Encyclopedia in stock, and had a look at it. It only covers the characters, not other aspects of the books (eg. places, events). It does includes references to the connector books, but not to fill-ins by other authors. It is meticulously detailed and takes the same care with walk-on parts as with main characters. Volume 1 covers A - D, and between each letter section, there is an article on more general aspects of the series - eg. the school uniform. I'm guessing that future volumes may cover more of the alphabet, but obviously B for Bettany took up a large chunk of this one! Illustrations are included in the text where relevant. It does look really nice and I was sorely tempted to buy it, but I am trying to be good this month and also there are those upcoming reprints of the novels on my wishlist ... Maybe if I find I have some money left at the end of the month I will treat myself to it some time.

That sounds pretty nice. I wonder how many volumes there will be in the end. After all, the Maynards and the Russells will take up a lot of space too. Is it the same size as the other GGB books?

No, it's one of their larger format books, about A4 or US letter paper size, with about 300 pages.

That's pretty big!

I ordered it from The Book Depository, so I should have it in two or three weeks.

How exciting! It looked to me to be one of those books that you open for a few minutes of browsing, and look up to find that three hours have passed!

I have a copy. I did some of the checking for GGBP and was offered a small discount. It's a bit overwhelming to look at but encyclopaedias aren't meant to be read cover-to-cover and I look forward to consulting it as I read through the series. Of course the main disadvantage at the moment is that only volume 1 has been published and since we've only got to D in the alphabet there must be several more volumes to come yet.

I just hope it doesn't take as long to publish all the volumes as it took for me to collect the CS series in the first place.

I found a very compact listin gof the books, fill-ins and related books. It looks to be a bit out of date, but I found it to be useful:
text EBD's Books
at the CBB

>12 MDGentleReader:: Thanks for sharing that. It's nice to have all the information on one page. And it's interesting to see which of those proposed fill-ins have actually made it into print!

Yes, I want Joey & Robin in India. Don't think that has happened.

I was reading in another thread about New Mistress at the Chalet School and went looking for information and found this resource:
New Mistress at the Chalet School character listing. The characters are listed by whether they are staff, which form (if known), old girls, etc. It's amazing.

>14 MDGentleReader:: I don't this is ever going to happen, unfortunately - the book was submitted to GGBP just about the same time as Two Chalet Girls in India and as it covered the same period, I believe they decided not to go ahead with it (which sucks for the author, who is a friend of a friend)

I just read Unseen Childhoods : disabled characters in 20th-century books for girls by Helen A. Aveling, a collection of nine essays by women with disabilities. The three broad themes that are explored are "Stereotypes", "Role Models", and "Inclusion and Segregation". There are many references to girls' school stories, particularly those of Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie J. Oxenham, and Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. One essay is titled "Changes in the Chalet School: Illness and Disability in the Chalet School Series". Oddly, the early Chalet School books are more inclusive than the later ones. Up to Jo to the Rescue, characters with disabilities or poor health live with those issues, and continue to be contributing members of the community. In the post-war books, EBD takes more of a "kill or cure" approach, and characters are more likely to be defined by their disabilities. The book is available as an ebook from Amazon, if anyone is interested in the subject.