REVIEW: The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge
Jul. 10th, 2014 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Scholarship Girl at Cambridge: Josephine Elder Girls Gone By Publishers 2012
In this sequel to The Scholarship Girl, (I wrote about it in passing here) we follow Monica and Francesca (aka Robin) to ‘Girnham’ College at Cambridge. As a ‘fresher, Monica is glad her friend is more assured in this new world, because Robin is the daughter of a professor and has grown up in this environment. At first, Monica is sure she will never fit in the way that the haughty-seeming second and third years do. Here, Monica’s social status and particular isn’t emphasised, although it contributes to her feelings.
But there’s absorbing work and hockey – in both instances, the good foundation of Greystones, their old school, stand Monica and Robin in good stead. Soon, there are other friends in their lives too, a group of girls known as ‘the family’ who play hard, talk nonsense fluently and generally see the world in the same way. All this almost seems too good to be true to Monica, who again won a scholarship to be here, and in an attempt to keep it going, she decides to adopt her neighbour Hester Williams, who she can see is lazy and has feeble ideas. Mistakenly, Monica sees herself as she was when she started public school in Hester and thinks she needs someone to help and influence her, as Robin did for Monica. But for all that Monica makes excuses for Hester, her selfishness irritates all the other members of the family. When the time comes to make a choice, Monica chooses Hester, and it doesn’t work out as she thought it would, pushing her out into the social wilds and leaving her an unhappy workaholic.
In the second year, Robin takes her chance to make things right. Monica has helped Hester to ‘stand on her own two feet’ and find friends with whom she has more in common with than Monica, making their break and Monica's return from the social wilds easier. In the third year, Monica, Robin and co become leaders at the college, with Monica’s hard work paying off in a first and another scholarship that will allow her to stay at Cambridge and carry on studying science there.
University stories for girls are rare – I suppose that the inability to write from experience held some writers back, but it’s a surprise that there aren’t more series following girls to college, really. In some ways, it’s much like school, with more independence in study and life. Elder possibly had an eye to a schoolgirl audience and parents who still needed reassureance about sending their daughters to university (although the book was first published in the 1920s). It’s a fairly enclosed female world, the only ‘chaps’ Monica interacts with are Francesca’s brother Jim and their father the professor, whom she first met in The Scholarship Girl. Monica’s concerns are finding her standing in this community – through social interaction, particularly helping on the fire brigade and through hockey. She likes her science work and wants to continue. The story doesn’t really ecamine what barriers she will face as a woman. The lack of male interaction academically tells there.
I felt that the book suffered from trying to cover three years. One wished, for Robin’s sake and her own sake, that Monica hadn’t spent so much time on her friendship with Hester, as it made her unhappy, even if she learned valuable life lessons from it. Still, she felt a little...stuck.
But you do get the authenticity of ‘jugs’ (cocoa-drinking parties) and ‘proposing’ (where senior girls deign to use a junior’s first name). Some of it reminded me of life at my university hall (although we decorated with posters and postcards, not real flowers. Maybe the odd print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or plastic ones.)
I read the introduction etc after the main story. A short story by Joesphine Elder is included where a bunch of schoolgirls get their comeuppance - suggesting again the paucity of university stories for girls, even by this author, because you'd have thought GGBP would have put in a story of university life were a suitable one available.
In this sequel to The Scholarship Girl, (I wrote about it in passing here) we follow Monica and Francesca (aka Robin) to ‘Girnham’ College at Cambridge. As a ‘fresher, Monica is glad her friend is more assured in this new world, because Robin is the daughter of a professor and has grown up in this environment. At first, Monica is sure she will never fit in the way that the haughty-seeming second and third years do. Here, Monica’s social status and particular isn’t emphasised, although it contributes to her feelings.
But there’s absorbing work and hockey – in both instances, the good foundation of Greystones, their old school, stand Monica and Robin in good stead. Soon, there are other friends in their lives too, a group of girls known as ‘the family’ who play hard, talk nonsense fluently and generally see the world in the same way. All this almost seems too good to be true to Monica, who again won a scholarship to be here, and in an attempt to keep it going, she decides to adopt her neighbour Hester Williams, who she can see is lazy and has feeble ideas. Mistakenly, Monica sees herself as she was when she started public school in Hester and thinks she needs someone to help and influence her, as Robin did for Monica. But for all that Monica makes excuses for Hester, her selfishness irritates all the other members of the family. When the time comes to make a choice, Monica chooses Hester, and it doesn’t work out as she thought it would, pushing her out into the social wilds and leaving her an unhappy workaholic.
In the second year, Robin takes her chance to make things right. Monica has helped Hester to ‘stand on her own two feet’ and find friends with whom she has more in common with than Monica, making their break and Monica's return from the social wilds easier. In the third year, Monica, Robin and co become leaders at the college, with Monica’s hard work paying off in a first and another scholarship that will allow her to stay at Cambridge and carry on studying science there.
University stories for girls are rare – I suppose that the inability to write from experience held some writers back, but it’s a surprise that there aren’t more series following girls to college, really. In some ways, it’s much like school, with more independence in study and life. Elder possibly had an eye to a schoolgirl audience and parents who still needed reassureance about sending their daughters to university (although the book was first published in the 1920s). It’s a fairly enclosed female world, the only ‘chaps’ Monica interacts with are Francesca’s brother Jim and their father the professor, whom she first met in The Scholarship Girl. Monica’s concerns are finding her standing in this community – through social interaction, particularly helping on the fire brigade and through hockey. She likes her science work and wants to continue. The story doesn’t really ecamine what barriers she will face as a woman. The lack of male interaction academically tells there.
I felt that the book suffered from trying to cover three years. One wished, for Robin’s sake and her own sake, that Monica hadn’t spent so much time on her friendship with Hester, as it made her unhappy, even if she learned valuable life lessons from it. Still, she felt a little...stuck.
But you do get the authenticity of ‘jugs’ (cocoa-drinking parties) and ‘proposing’ (where senior girls deign to use a junior’s first name). Some of it reminded me of life at my university hall (although we decorated with posters and postcards, not real flowers. Maybe the odd print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or plastic ones.)
I read the introduction etc after the main story. A short story by Joesphine Elder is included where a bunch of schoolgirls get their comeuppance - suggesting again the paucity of university stories for girls, even by this author, because you'd have thought GGBP would have put in a story of university life were a suitable one available.
