REVIEW: The Princess of the School
Feb. 23rd, 2014 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Princess of the School: Angela Brazil. Blackie.
This book is half school story and half family story, with the first half being more successful in my opinion. There are the usual Brazil touches (names, love of nature, mad theories and chapters taken up by girls writing stories or poems and reading them out).
The school is a select one, with some twenty boarding pupils run by a Miss Walters. The dormitories are named after colours and the girls of the blue dorm call it the Blue Grotto. Two of its residents are Ingletons. Orphaned by the drowning of the Titanic (which dates the story at 1922-3 to 1923-4 by my reckoning) they and their brothers have been taken in at the nearby Cheverley Chase by their grandfather. Their Cousin Clare has stepped in to look after them. Not only is it home, it is assumed that Everard, their older brother, will inherit. He assures his sisters that he’ll look out for them in quite a lordly fashion, but it turns out that ‘the young squire’ was presuming too much. For when his grandfather suddenly dies, it turns out that Leslie, the only child of Mr Ingleton’s eldest son, previously easliy disregarded as a baby in a photograph, is to inherit. Everard, about seventeen, vows to leave the Chase when he discovers, not even staying for his grandfather’s funeral.
But Leslie is really Carmel – the titular princess – a half-Italian who is brought slightly unwillingly to her English inheritance by Cousin Clare. Homesick for Sicily and her family there, she makes no claims and tries to be friends with the Ingletons. Dulcie, at least, is happy to do so, while eldest sister Lilias is feeling a little sore on Everard’s behalf...
As you can see, we have some classic Brazil names here, Dulcie, Lilias and Everard are uncommon names, although they make sense for siblings, Carmel owes something to making her an exotic figure, but there’s also a Gowan in the Blue Grotto. The school story is about how the girls entertain themselves, mainly – a school play here, a half-hearted feud there (although they decide to name their secret society a Mafia after a comment by Carmel who lives in Sicily, which made me choke. I choked some more at one theory put forward by a visiting mistress that 1920s Britain was some kind of higher civilisation, akin to Classical Greece, while medieval Chaucer and also the Plantagenets were like mere children in comparison.) Being at school and the fun she has there helps Carmel get over her homesickness.
I was also reminded a little of Downton Abbey, not just in that the Titanic formed a backdrop in a domestic drama over succession, oh no. For Carmel joins other connections on a touring holiday over the summer to get to see England, and at one point is rescued by the young chauffeur. (Rarely for a Brazil book, there’s romance here, and even, it’s hinted, for Dulcie, who finds a boy friend in a later visit to Sicily. He’s English.) The quiet young chauffeur who can understand Latin.
‘Johnson’ is, of course, Carmel’s previously unknown cousin, Everard. She and his sisters talk him out of being a stubborn young goat and he rejoins the family, humbled by his months of living on his wits. As Carmel, the owner of the Chase, is not what he thought she’d be, charming rather than grasping, Everard is quite happy to play rescuer to her on occasion and study for university, less happy to find that she has another cousin whose name starts with E in Sicily. But Ernesto is not English. Brazil gets into her usual difficulties with being aware that English people can be insular, but believing they are superior, and that pride is bad, but some pride is proper.
For there is a missing will and Everard will become the squire and the princess of the school (Carmel has charmed everyone there), presumably, his wife. One wishes Brazil hadn’t bothered with the romance – the girls seem more obsessed with romance than is usual in most boarding school stories. The story rambles on with the overall story of the inheritance playing on, although there’s some distance between us and Carmel – and yet, we’re not invited to fully sympathise with Dulcie, Lilias or Everard. Some writers would have made more of Lilias blaming Carmel for getting in Everard's way and forcing him to leave, but Brazil doesn't really. There are other strands that never come together – like with Cousin Clare. A lot of what entertained me about the book were accidental, really.
This book is half school story and half family story, with the first half being more successful in my opinion. There are the usual Brazil touches (names, love of nature, mad theories and chapters taken up by girls writing stories or poems and reading them out).
The school is a select one, with some twenty boarding pupils run by a Miss Walters. The dormitories are named after colours and the girls of the blue dorm call it the Blue Grotto. Two of its residents are Ingletons. Orphaned by the drowning of the Titanic (which dates the story at 1922-3 to 1923-4 by my reckoning) they and their brothers have been taken in at the nearby Cheverley Chase by their grandfather. Their Cousin Clare has stepped in to look after them. Not only is it home, it is assumed that Everard, their older brother, will inherit. He assures his sisters that he’ll look out for them in quite a lordly fashion, but it turns out that ‘the young squire’ was presuming too much. For when his grandfather suddenly dies, it turns out that Leslie, the only child of Mr Ingleton’s eldest son, previously easliy disregarded as a baby in a photograph, is to inherit. Everard, about seventeen, vows to leave the Chase when he discovers, not even staying for his grandfather’s funeral.
But Leslie is really Carmel – the titular princess – a half-Italian who is brought slightly unwillingly to her English inheritance by Cousin Clare. Homesick for Sicily and her family there, she makes no claims and tries to be friends with the Ingletons. Dulcie, at least, is happy to do so, while eldest sister Lilias is feeling a little sore on Everard’s behalf...
As you can see, we have some classic Brazil names here, Dulcie, Lilias and Everard are uncommon names, although they make sense for siblings, Carmel owes something to making her an exotic figure, but there’s also a Gowan in the Blue Grotto. The school story is about how the girls entertain themselves, mainly – a school play here, a half-hearted feud there (although they decide to name their secret society a Mafia after a comment by Carmel who lives in Sicily, which made me choke. I choked some more at one theory put forward by a visiting mistress that 1920s Britain was some kind of higher civilisation, akin to Classical Greece, while medieval Chaucer and also the Plantagenets were like mere children in comparison.) Being at school and the fun she has there helps Carmel get over her homesickness.
I was also reminded a little of Downton Abbey, not just in that the Titanic formed a backdrop in a domestic drama over succession, oh no. For Carmel joins other connections on a touring holiday over the summer to get to see England, and at one point is rescued by the young chauffeur. (Rarely for a Brazil book, there’s romance here, and even, it’s hinted, for Dulcie, who finds a boy friend in a later visit to Sicily. He’s English.) The quiet young chauffeur who can understand Latin.
‘Johnson’ is, of course, Carmel’s previously unknown cousin, Everard. She and his sisters talk him out of being a stubborn young goat and he rejoins the family, humbled by his months of living on his wits. As Carmel, the owner of the Chase, is not what he thought she’d be, charming rather than grasping, Everard is quite happy to play rescuer to her on occasion and study for university, less happy to find that she has another cousin whose name starts with E in Sicily. But Ernesto is not English. Brazil gets into her usual difficulties with being aware that English people can be insular, but believing they are superior, and that pride is bad, but some pride is proper.
For there is a missing will and Everard will become the squire and the princess of the school (Carmel has charmed everyone there), presumably, his wife. One wishes Brazil hadn’t bothered with the romance – the girls seem more obsessed with romance than is usual in most boarding school stories. The story rambles on with the overall story of the inheritance playing on, although there’s some distance between us and Carmel – and yet, we’re not invited to fully sympathise with Dulcie, Lilias or Everard. Some writers would have made more of Lilias blaming Carmel for getting in Everard's way and forcing him to leave, but Brazil doesn't really. There are other strands that never come together – like with Cousin Clare. A lot of what entertained me about the book were accidental, really.
