REVIEW: Jane Runs Away from School
Jul. 3rd, 2021 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllJane Runs Away from School: Joanna Lloyd. Blackie (inscribed 11 Oct 1947)
This book is set in the Bramber Manor/Catharine (Kate) Maitland series, focused on new girl Jane Duncan. (This is the pseudonym the author of the ‘My Friends’ series adopted, although those books were published later.) Jane goes to school with a bad case of internalised sexism. Tomboyish, the daughter of a soldier who has looked up to her two brothers, without having had many girl friends over the years, she assumes girls and all their doings are silly and inferior. She’s also miserable, because her father and mother have left for India and decided now is the time for Jane to go to boarding school. So, there the aunt and uncle now responsible for her have sent her.
What this amounts to is that, determined not to like school or even to try to like it, Jane is a problem for the girls of Shaftsbury House at Bramber Manor. Only Catharine Maitland, who is scatty about normal things like directions, but not lessons or human nature, is astute to notice that beneath Jane’s don’t-care attitude, lies unhappiness.
But Jane has decided to run away almost upon arrival, and having come up with a means of exit, a disguise and a heading, she is set on carrying it out, even though an English lesson with absent-minded but enthusiastic Miss Laing, a walk in the countryside and games, which she’s innately good at, have started to capture her interest. And so she runs away.
The author does well in making the whole venture uncomfortable and far more difficult than Jane, who hasn’t planned ahead that meticulously, expect, but doesn’t put her heroine in any real danger. She also shows the impact the new girl’s departure has on the more responsible girls, the mistresses and Jane’s family, who genuinely don’t know where the fourteen-year-old girl has gone for a couple of days.
Lloyd did lose me rather by having Jane’s nurse coincidentally live in the same village in Devonshire as Catharine’s family. I was slightly mollified by how the Maitlands, from young Jill who longs to follow ‘Kate’ to school, to sensible Mrs Maitland and the vicar, who is much like his eldest daughter, help Jane see that she’s been a bit of an idiot and would rather love to go back to school, if she’s be allowed back.
She is allowed back to Shaftsbury House, where, on the whole, the girls stick to orders to ‘say no more about it’ and indeed almost forget that Jane did run away. Lacrosse, Catharine’s continued mishaps and the friendship of fellow new girl Agnes, who appears to be Jane’s opposite, help her settle down and even show signs of becoming a credit to the house.
Lloyd is writing in a comic vein, and the big test of doing so is how much I laughed or even smiled. I didn’t do that enough to call the book ‘hilarious’. I did like Miss Burgess, the housemistress’s reaction of increased nervousness about her position and questioning her career choices, at the girls’ misadventures. But generally the girls’ sarcastic talk about Catharine’s foibles struck me as borderline bullying, although Kate took it in good spirit. But generally the comic set-ups that lead to farcical situations were too contrived for my tastes.
But Lloyd is better than your run-of-the-mill school story writer. She does a decent job of dipping into Jane’s point of view, and she uses some tropes that many writers (especially Angela Brazil) use more effectively. That is apart from adapting their end-of-term pantomime, Cinderella, to be about school life, I could have done without that chapter. But Miss Laing’s lesson, where the girls all have to quote some poetry, also reveals Jane’s character and state of mind, set against general schoolgirl stupidity. Then there’s the chapter of letters after Jane has been returned to school (she has to write a lot of short letters in response to her brothers’ chiding epistles and to thank various people who looked after her on her travails) again entertain and show character. There’s even a light running reference to Shakespeare’s cross-dressing with a fancy dress party where the Duncans’ party dress up from ‘Twelfth Night’ and Jane disguising herself as a boy while she runs away.
This book is set in the Bramber Manor/Catharine (Kate) Maitland series, focused on new girl Jane Duncan. (This is the pseudonym the author of the ‘My Friends’ series adopted, although those books were published later.) Jane goes to school with a bad case of internalised sexism. Tomboyish, the daughter of a soldier who has looked up to her two brothers, without having had many girl friends over the years, she assumes girls and all their doings are silly and inferior. She’s also miserable, because her father and mother have left for India and decided now is the time for Jane to go to boarding school. So, there the aunt and uncle now responsible for her have sent her.
What this amounts to is that, determined not to like school or even to try to like it, Jane is a problem for the girls of Shaftsbury House at Bramber Manor. Only Catharine Maitland, who is scatty about normal things like directions, but not lessons or human nature, is astute to notice that beneath Jane’s don’t-care attitude, lies unhappiness.
But Jane has decided to run away almost upon arrival, and having come up with a means of exit, a disguise and a heading, she is set on carrying it out, even though an English lesson with absent-minded but enthusiastic Miss Laing, a walk in the countryside and games, which she’s innately good at, have started to capture her interest. And so she runs away.
The author does well in making the whole venture uncomfortable and far more difficult than Jane, who hasn’t planned ahead that meticulously, expect, but doesn’t put her heroine in any real danger. She also shows the impact the new girl’s departure has on the more responsible girls, the mistresses and Jane’s family, who genuinely don’t know where the fourteen-year-old girl has gone for a couple of days.
Lloyd did lose me rather by having Jane’s nurse coincidentally live in the same village in Devonshire as Catharine’s family. I was slightly mollified by how the Maitlands, from young Jill who longs to follow ‘Kate’ to school, to sensible Mrs Maitland and the vicar, who is much like his eldest daughter, help Jane see that she’s been a bit of an idiot and would rather love to go back to school, if she’s be allowed back.
She is allowed back to Shaftsbury House, where, on the whole, the girls stick to orders to ‘say no more about it’ and indeed almost forget that Jane did run away. Lacrosse, Catharine’s continued mishaps and the friendship of fellow new girl Agnes, who appears to be Jane’s opposite, help her settle down and even show signs of becoming a credit to the house.
Lloyd is writing in a comic vein, and the big test of doing so is how much I laughed or even smiled. I didn’t do that enough to call the book ‘hilarious’. I did like Miss Burgess, the housemistress’s reaction of increased nervousness about her position and questioning her career choices, at the girls’ misadventures. But generally the girls’ sarcastic talk about Catharine’s foibles struck me as borderline bullying, although Kate took it in good spirit. But generally the comic set-ups that lead to farcical situations were too contrived for my tastes.
But Lloyd is better than your run-of-the-mill school story writer. She does a decent job of dipping into Jane’s point of view, and she uses some tropes that many writers (especially Angela Brazil) use more effectively. That is apart from adapting their end-of-term pantomime, Cinderella, to be about school life, I could have done without that chapter. But Miss Laing’s lesson, where the girls all have to quote some poetry, also reveals Jane’s character and state of mind, set against general schoolgirl stupidity. Then there’s the chapter of letters after Jane has been returned to school (she has to write a lot of short letters in response to her brothers’ chiding epistles and to thank various people who looked after her on her travails) again entertain and show character. There’s even a light running reference to Shakespeare’s cross-dressing with a fancy dress party where the Duncans’ party dress up from ‘Twelfth Night’ and Jane disguising herself as a boy while she runs away.
