REVIEW: The New Girl at St Chad's
Jun. 20th, 2010 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllI am so behind, I finished reading this last weekend and meant to post this then!
The New Girl at St Chad’s: Angela Brazil Blackie.
Three ‘bookmarks’ were found in this book – a pressed flower, which will stay, a picture of E.R.T. Holmes, a cricket player, cut out from a newspaper, and a sentimental verse, cut out of a girls’ magazine based on what is on the back.
Honor Fitzgerald is a wild young thing, generally undisciplined, thoughtless and willful. When she ’buys’ a horse despite her father’s express prohibition, he puts his foot down and sends her to school in England – to Chessington College, where she is put into St Chad’s house. The girls there have very definite views on the honour of the house and prefer to be stoics rather than be thought of as Early Victorian. They also expect new girls to be unobtrusive and receptive to their pearls of wisdom (as per the monitress I quoted). Lively Honor, soon nicknamed ‘Paddy Pepperbox’, couldn’t be described as such a paragon.
Very quickly on, she is moved to a small dormitory with a shy ‘good’ girl, Janie Henderson, who has been rather a non-entity in both school and house up till now, but opens up to Honor and is as good an influence on her as the house mistress could hope. However, it takes a while to reform Honor, who gets up to pranks, but is always strictly honourable, until towards the end, when, in typical Brazil fashion, a series of coincidences mean that she is wrongly suspected of stealing but can’t exonerate herself because to do so would be to get her brother into trouble for something else (a brother I had far less sympathy for, because 1. he was the one who paid for a dog ‘on tick’ with no thought of how he was going to pay it back; 2. I’m not biased towards thinking that his reputation/career prospects were more important than his sister’s reputation/schooling, especially when the book was all about his sister.)
Although it’s typical Brazil – Honor and Janie’s friendship, a craze for botany and Honor as the lively non-English girl who comes in like a breath of fresh air to a school, because although she is civilised, she does challenge and make an impact pn the masses – it reminded me of the Chalet School. Maybe it was the fancy dress party where they had to make up costumes from what they had available (Honor tears up a sheet to make hers and ends up having to mend it herself). Maybe it was the way authority is described – strict but well-meaning moniitoress Vivian, the house mistress and the head mistress and how the adults, at least, try to make Honor think about why the expectations of the school of the girls as community members and adhering to the rules are good for the whole (and make the individual more disciplined). Maybe it was the house system, because the girls are proud of their house’s standing within the school rather than thinking so much of how the school is perceived outside.
Anyway, it’s a lively (if familiar) read, with Honor’s development leavened by interaction with her classmates – some of whom were more differentiated than usual with Brazil.
Edited on 7/5/11
The New Girl at St Chad’s: Angela Brazil Blackie.
Three ‘bookmarks’ were found in this book – a pressed flower, which will stay, a picture of E.R.T. Holmes, a cricket player, cut out from a newspaper, and a sentimental verse, cut out of a girls’ magazine based on what is on the back.
Honor Fitzgerald is a wild young thing, generally undisciplined, thoughtless and willful. When she ’buys’ a horse despite her father’s express prohibition, he puts his foot down and sends her to school in England – to Chessington College, where she is put into St Chad’s house. The girls there have very definite views on the honour of the house and prefer to be stoics rather than be thought of as Early Victorian. They also expect new girls to be unobtrusive and receptive to their pearls of wisdom (as per the monitress I quoted). Lively Honor, soon nicknamed ‘Paddy Pepperbox’, couldn’t be described as such a paragon.
Very quickly on, she is moved to a small dormitory with a shy ‘good’ girl, Janie Henderson, who has been rather a non-entity in both school and house up till now, but opens up to Honor and is as good an influence on her as the house mistress could hope. However, it takes a while to reform Honor, who gets up to pranks, but is always strictly honourable, until towards the end, when, in typical Brazil fashion, a series of coincidences mean that she is wrongly suspected of stealing but can’t exonerate herself because to do so would be to get her brother into trouble for something else (a brother I had far less sympathy for, because 1. he was the one who paid for a dog ‘on tick’ with no thought of how he was going to pay it back; 2. I’m not biased towards thinking that his reputation/career prospects were more important than his sister’s reputation/schooling, especially when the book was all about his sister.)
Although it’s typical Brazil – Honor and Janie’s friendship, a craze for botany and Honor as the lively non-English girl who comes in like a breath of fresh air to a school, because although she is civilised, she does challenge and make an impact pn the masses – it reminded me of the Chalet School. Maybe it was the fancy dress party where they had to make up costumes from what they had available (Honor tears up a sheet to make hers and ends up having to mend it herself). Maybe it was the way authority is described – strict but well-meaning moniitoress Vivian, the house mistress and the head mistress and how the adults, at least, try to make Honor think about why the expectations of the school of the girls as community members and adhering to the rules are good for the whole (and make the individual more disciplined). Maybe it was the house system, because the girls are proud of their house’s standing within the school rather than thinking so much of how the school is perceived outside.
Anyway, it’s a lively (if familiar) read, with Honor’s development leavened by interaction with her classmates – some of whom were more differentiated than usual with Brazil.
Edited on 7/5/11
