Challenge for the Chalet School

The Chalet School #55

by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

When the headmistress of the Chalet School announces she will be away the whole term, both staff and pupils are thrown into confusion. The girls rally round, but the collapse of Miss Ferrars and the antics of two new students causes everyone to wonder whether they can survive the term.

Genres: Childrens, School Stories, Fiction, School, British Literature

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Elinor M. Brent-Dyer was born as Gladys Eleanor May Dyer on 6th April 1894, in South Shields in the industrial northeast of England, and grew up in a terraced house which had no garden or inside toilet. She was the only daughter of Eleanor Watson Rutherford and Charles Morris Brent Dyer. Her father, who had been married before, left home when she was three years old. In 1912, her brother Henzell died at age 17 of cerebro-spinal fever. After her father died, her mother remarried in 1913.

Elinor was educated at a small local private school in South Shields and returned there to teach when she was eighteen after spending two years at the City of Leeds Training College. Her teaching career spanned 36 years, during which she taught in a wide variety of state and private schools in the northeast, in Middlesex, Bedfordshire, Hampshire, and finally in Hereford.

In the early 1920s she adopted the name Elinor Mary Brent-Dyer. A holiday she spent in the Austrian Tyrol at Pertisau-am-Achensee gave her the inspiration for the first location in the Chalet School series. However, her first book, 'Gerry Goes to School', was published in 1922 and was written for the child actress Hazel Bainbridge. Her first 'Chalet' story, 'The School at the Chalet', was originally published in 1925.

In 1930, the same year that 'Jean of Storms' was serialised, she converted to Roman Catholicism.

In 1933 the Brent-Dyer household (she lived with her mother and stepfather until her mother's death in 1957) moved to Hereford. She travelled daily to Peterchurch as a governess.

When her stepfather died she started her own school in Hereford, The Margaret Roper School. It was non-denominational but with a strong religious tradition. Many Chalet School customs were followed, the girls even wore a similar uniform made in the Chalet School's colours of brown and flame. Elinor was rather untidy, erratic and flamboyant and not really suited to being a headmistress. After her school closed in 1948 she devoted most of her time to writing.

Elinor's mother died in 1957 and in 1964 she moved to Redhill, where she lived in a joint establishment with fellow school story author Phyllis Matthewman and her husband, until her death on 20th September 1969.

During her lifetime Elinor M. Brent-Dyer published 101 books but she is remembered mainly for her Chalet School series. The series numbers 58 books and is the longest-surviving series of girls' school-stories ever known, having been continuously in print for more than 70 years. One hundred thousand paperback copies are still being sold each year.

Among her published books are other school stories; family, historical, adventure and animal stories; a cookery book, and four educational geography-readers. She also wrote plays and numerous unpublished poems and was a keen musician.

In 1994, the year of the centenary of her Elinor Brent-Dyer's birth, Friends of the Chalet School put up plaques in Pertisau, South Shields and Hereford, and a headstone was erected on her grave in Redstone Cemetery, since there was not one previously. They also put flowers on her grave on the anniversaries of her birth and death and on other special occasions.

Reviews

[Iona Sharma]

The Chalet School came up a discussion with friends recently and I learned that the internet archive has a few that are free to read, so I picked this one at random and.... eh. I loved the series as a kid and read them to pieces but never the later ones as the run of reprinting stopped at about the 25-book mark, and honestly I don't know if I missed a lot? This one is pretty dreadful - there are a bunch of plot threads all jammed haphazardly together - and the author doesn't do as good a job as usual at obscuring the truly wacky bits of the Chalet School, like the ridiculous trilingualism policy and her habit of just bringing an Old Girl for a chapter or two without particular reason. I did like the return of Stacie Benson! Her book is no. 4 in the series and one of the best - good to know she has her doctorate and is now safely Dr Benson, despite EBD's habit of turning people into nuns or the parents of eleven Catholic children.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last of the white-spined Armada paperbacks, so a bit of a milestone in my re-read. And at least the girls on the cover are in blue. The first time I read it, the previous book was unavailable, so the apparent disappearance of Claire from the Freudesheim nursery went unnoticed; but even this time, I'm left wondering when exactly Phil became so ill with polio.

Challenge is a actually quite a complicated Chalet, as there are several plots going on simultaneously, and each of those splits up into further, inter-crossing plots. It's probably best illustrated by Venn diagrams or something but my html isn't up to that so here's the description:

Staffroom changes plot: Miss Annersley is away for the term, so Miss Wilmot takes over as head. So we have the 'inexperienced head' thing going on as Miss Wilmot learns how to do her new job. Miss Ferrars is then taken ill, so Dr Benson comes in to teach ('new teacher', 'difficult junior', 'difficult senior' all intersect here), and the prefects are given the job of producing the nativity play ('difficult junior' and 'difficult senior' intersect here, and not just at the end when, as you'd expect, they are struck by the message of the story and turn into new people.)

Difficult senior plot: Evelyn, whose mother is being treated at the Sanatorium, is mighty miffed to find herself at school. This results in an 'all hate the new girl' plot (intersects with 'inexperienced head'), a 'new best friend' plot (sadly discarded before it gets going, in the paperback at lest), 'Margot's temper', and 'ill mother' (intersects with the 'Freudesheim' plot).

Difficult junior plot: Jocelyn is a pain in the neck ('new teacher'), gets into trouble over the nativity play ('staffroom changes' - it would never have happened if Miss F had been there), and then runs away and has to be rescued from the snow ('Freudesheim').

Freudesheim plot: Phil is being treated for polio so Joey isn't as in and out the school as usual, and the triplets (now all senior prefects) are worrying about her (Phil, that is, not Joey). Mary-Lou turns up ('difficult junior', 'difficult senior', 'ill mother', 'staffroom changes') for a fortnight.

It's as if EBD jotted down lots of ideas onto a pack of cards, picked 24 at random, and then tried to work out how she could join them all up into a story. Sometimes it works - I do like the cobbler's wax trick and its aftermath, and it's good to see Mary-Lou losing her temper for once, even if she only does it for a sentence. And as Chalet School books go, it's not a dull one. But there is so much going on that what it's supposed to be about - the Chalet School coping with the absence of Miss Annersley - gets a bit lost and doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a challenge as the title suggests.

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's such a shame EBD didn't write this book 20 years earlier than she did. The concept of "longstanding, superb headmistress goes away for a term and leaves younger, less experienced colleague in charge" is actually a really, really good one, and EBD in her prime would have handled it superbly. Unfortunately, she wrote this in her declining years and the book actually focusses far more on a couple of difficult new girls and an old girl coming back to teach than on the trials and tribulations of Nancy Wilmot trying to step into Miss Annersley's shoes. We already know that EBD wrote brilliantly from a teacher's point of view (see New Mistress for evidence) and this had the potential to be even better, but unfortunately falls quickly into the somewhat formulaic pattern of the last few books.

[Yellowoasis · Rating 2 out of 5]

The long holiday weekend beckons and I'm off to boarding school! We have a menu of traditional school dinners lined up. The weather forecast is not much cop - perfect for some juvenile adventures. If the Swiss boarding school fails to inspire, I've got Malory Towers as a backup. I wonder if Matron will let me spend three days in the sick bay to get on with my reading. Beef tea, anyone?

Well, I really wanted to like this book, feeling instinctively that it's better written than the Blyton boarding school stories, but it just did not move me in the way that it should have. To begin with, it's not so much about boarding school life as the other events playing out in Austria in the late 1930s. So I didn't finish it.

[Sarah A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another enjoyable late Chalet book. This one is a little weird in splitting the book's focus. The first half focuses on one girl - Evelyn, and the second half on Jocelyn. I would have preferred two books to deal properly with them both but realize that Elinor was probably aware she was coming to the end.
A re feature of Mary-Lou and of Stacie Benson - great to see these two characters again! Loved learning how Stacie has changed!

[Margaret Conmey · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was seeing this book on a display shelf at the town library almost 50 years ago that started my Chalet School fandom. Having finally bought this copy to complete the series ( all Girls Gone By Editions) I decided that I would read the complete series IN ORDER for the first time. The books have been steadily become weaker in the last few books of the series and I wondered how I would feel about this book re-reading it now. I only recall 2 episodes from the first read .
First .the scene where Margot and Felicity are walking to school and Felicity asked Margot to stop calling her by her baby nickname Flixy . I remembered wondering why the Maynard girls were boarders when they lived right Nextdoor to the school!
The other episode was when Evelyn was leaning over her tuberculous mother while her mother is coughing and is pushed away due to the worry about infection.

I quite enjoyed this book even though most of the problems of the later books are evident and it was a little difficult to understand exactly what it was about these books that I first read when I was 11 years old that made be search out all the Chalet School titles that the library had and then buy second hand copies of the Armada editions over the next couple of years before growing out of the series and then returning to the series again as an adult.
I still love the Chalet School series and EBD’s writing had a huge influence on me but I would advise anyone new to the books to start with earlier books , not only as they are generally much better but to avoid all the spoilers!

Ultimately, I think the appeal of the CS series is the feeling of family and the Alpine settings, plus a variety of capable girls.
Just 3 more books to go to complete the series.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is 55 in the original series, 59 in the Armada version, which I have - and which, along with a few others, has not been cut in any way. It starts with Miss Annersley explaining that she's going to be away for a term... but that thread isn't really explored. Instead the book focuses on two rather different new girls, neither of whom want to be at the school.

I loved 'Summer Term' which immediately precedes this, but thought this one was rather run-of-the-mill, with far too much detail about day-to-day Chalet School life. It's not a book I'd recommend as a starting point to the series; in fact I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone other than fans who are reading through all the books.

Nevertheless, it's a chapter in the lives of people I find myself caring about; Elinor M Brent-Dyer had a tremendous gift of characterisation. The Maynard/Bettany/Russell families and the Chalet School staff and older pupils have felt like friends for most of my life, and the books, even the less interesting ones, make great comfort reading.

Appropriate for anyone over the age of about nine or ten, although it's likely to appeal more to girls than to boys.

[Jane Irish Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably not quite four stars, but rounded up since I like the series. But this is not one of the better books in the series, in fact it is a bit of a mish-mash, that appears to have borrowed bits and pieces of the plot from previous books. The first challenge is that the Head, Miss Annersley, will be away for most of the term, but the staff step up, and Miss Wilmot takes her place. Then, new girl Evelyn Ross, annoyed at having to return to school at sixteen, especially to a large school, where she will be no one, instead of the leader she would have been at her old school, finds it hard to fit in at first. A potential plot point involving her is raised, but not followed through. Instead the story turns to a younger new girl, Jocelyn Marvell, a scamp of the first rank, who has her own troubles. Everything works out in the end, with yet another moving Nativity play.

[Nicola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as 'thin' as some of the later books, but mainly because of the way EBD shoved plot point after plot point in there - a shame, because the narrative could have done some really interesting things if given room to breathe.

An OK instalment. #trope-tastic

[Sally · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have adored this book as a child. Boarding school adventures. Nicely written book of its time. Enjoyed reading a children’s book for a change. The characters were interesting and a glimpse into a bygone era.

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit muddled.