L.T. MeadeCritiques

Bedad! L.T. Meade explores the idea of the "Wild Irish Girl" with a vengeance in this school story from 1902, which sees the vivacious, high-spirited, rule-breaking Kathleen O'Hara come to England to attend the Great Shirley School. With four hundred pupils, the school is divided between one hundred "Foundationers," who are from poorer backgrounds, and are allowed to attend the school for free, and some three hundred non-foundation girls, who are paying pupils. The tensions between the two groups - the non-foundationers look down on the Foundation girls, who feel resentful in return - are exacerbated by Kathleen, who has been allowed to roam free at her grandfather's castle in Ireland, and who has no notion of or respect for English class divisions or school rules. Although rooming with the family of Alice Tennant, who is a non-foundation girl, she chooses her friends from amongst the Foundation girls, and forms a secret society, which she calls "The Wild Irish Girls." This leads to quite a bit of trouble, not just for Kathleen, who will not be materially harmed by it, but for the girls who are her supposed friends, and whose social position is more precarious than hers. Eventually, after much sturm and drang, Kathleen's rebellion is quashed, and in a very brief conclusion, all is resolved amicably...

A late-19th-century author of Anglo-Irish background, L.T. Meade grew up in County Cork, before moving to London as a young woman and launching a career writing children's books, mysteries, historical adventures, and sentimental romances. She penned over three hundred books, a number of which - The Rebel of the School, Wild Kitty, A Wild Irish Girl, etc. - featured the kind of "Wild Irish Girl" character (or caricature, if one prefers) seen here. This type - the free-spirited, often poetic, always emotional girl, who has trouble conforming to the stricter social rules of English society, but nevertheless has a heart of gold, and some emotional wisdom to share with her English peers - can be traced back to Sydney Owenson's 1806 The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, which features a romance between a dissolute English nobleman, and the daughter of a dispossessed Gaelic prince. There is an interesting article by Carole Dunbar on the use of the type in the work of L.T. Meade and Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey in Studies in Children's Literature, 1500-2000. I understand that more recently, Sandra McAvoy's "The 'Wild Irish Girl' in Selected Novels of L.T. Meade" appeared in Adolescence in Modern Irish History. I would imagine that the use of the type here, and the book's connection to Ireland, explains why The Rebel of the School was chosen for our syllabus, in the class on the history of children's literature that I took, while getting my masters at an Irish university.

Despite finding all of this interesting, from a literary and social history perspective, I found that I did not enjoy reading The Rebel of the School. It was not my first book from Meade - before taking my masters, I had read A World of Girls and The Girls of St. Wode's - so I was expecting the style of writing, and the sometimes divided plot-lines. What I wasn't expecting was to find the main character so thoroughly annoying. I recall reading this, in my university library, and texting one of my masters cohort afterward, to say that if Kathleen had said the word 'bedad' one more time, I might have chucked the book across the room. It isn't just the showy "Irishness" here, that felt over the top and stereotypically "stage Irish" to me, it was the fact that Kathleen is so oblivious to the welfare and real feelings of her so-called friends, leading them into situations that could be very damaging for them, perhaps even imperil their ability to get an education, and therefore, possible ability to prosper economically. It irritated me to see the author depict her as somehow loving, when it is so clear that her actions are driven by her own desires and feelings, and are entirely inward-looking. It was particularly troubling to see this quality of obliviousness, or indifference to the good of others, set down to some kind of "Irish" nature. Finally, I found the conclusion, which is terribly rushed, completely unconvincing. It felt as if, having created a mess through her character, Meade ran out of time and energy to untangle the snarled plot-lines of her story, and just decided to end it with a kind of one-page "and it all turned out well" declaration.

I'm not sure I would highly recommend this one, unless it be to the determined fan of Meade, who does have her devotees, or to the reader interested in the 'Wild Irish Girl' character in children's fiction.

He brought out his microscope, which I saw, to my delight, was of the latest design, and I set to work at once, while he watched me with evident interest. At last the crucial moment came, and I bent over the instrument and adjusted the focus on my preparation. My suspicions were only too well confirmed by which I had extracted what I saw.

I previously read an excerpt from The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings in The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, but the whole thing is on Project Gutenberg. Brotherhood is actually very similar to Sorceress: a scientific man keeps running into the dastardly plans of a scientific woman taking London by storm, a woman both beautiful and vaguely occult. Brotherhood was serialized (in The Strand), but it's somewhere between a Charles Dickens novel and a Sherlock Holmes story. It's not one big story like a Dickens serial, but it's not a string of standalones like Doyle's Holmes stories.

Rather, Norman Head (who studied physiology at Cambridge, but never qualified, and now does it out of sheer love) has a different encounter with some agent of Madame Koluchy's in each story. Sometimes he wins, sometime Koluchy wins, and the stories gradually chart their battle. It's like one of those tv series where the same bad guy is behind every plot, and sometime the situation changes, but mostly it remains static until the season finale.

The stories are decent, if not great. Meade over-depends on characters giving long backstory dumps to one another, which sucks the tension out of some tales, but other I enjoyed. Most stories have some kind of scientific conceit at their heart, making them borderline science fiction or maybe technothrillers-- people killed with new disease strains, or burglars using pendulums, or a temperature-triggered explosive, or x-rays used as a weapon. (The book has a co-writing credit for Robert Eustance; Janis Dawson's introduction to Sorceress says this is Robert Eustace Barton, who provided Meade with medical/scientific information while she wrote the stories herself [19].)

Madame Koluchy herself is kind of the best part. She's barely in the stories, usually working through agents, but that makes her all the more captivating. She's supposedly a scientist, and she does indeed invent things, but this is mostly what we're told about her. When we are actually shown her, her effect is more occult; she pulls people into her orbit with her beauty, and grants them what they desire if they help her advance the power of the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Boring old Norman Head (and his lawyer friend) are hardly worthy adversaries; Head used to be a member of the Brotherhood and in love with Koluchy, but it's hard to imagine this. A version of this with more Madame Koluchy, and more consistently intriguing and varied plots, would be a good book, but as it is, we have a pedestrian one with occasional flashes of interest.

The rather drab dustjacket does what it is paid for on this volume. it washes its face. It keeps the real cover pretty pristine and there to see behind it is the pretty girl, long curly hair in tresses, straw hat - and what is that in her hand - a whip? There is a chapter called 'Doing a wilful deed'. It is quite serious though page 129: 'If to be a New Woman means being well educated, and taking an interest in life, and seeing plenty of my fellow men and women, then I am going to become one', said Barbara stoutly.

"There is no doubt that she is very clever. She knows a little bit of everything, and has wonderful recipes with regard to medicines, surgery, and dentistry. She is a most lovely woman herself, very fair, with blue eyes, an innocent, childlike manner, and quantities of rippling gold hair. [...] This woman deals in all sorts of curious, secrets, but principally in cosmetics. Her shop in the Strand could, I fancy, tell many a strange history. Her clients go there, and she does what is necessary for them." (120)

L. T. Meade was a force to be reckoned with in the British magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She wrote many recurring features, kind of like Sherlock Holmes. This Broadview edition collects single installments from Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1893-95), The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898), and The Heart of a Mystery (1901), as well as all six installments of The Sorceress of the Strand (1902-03). There's a lot of medicine and/or science in the stories collected here: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor is about the weird crimes a doctor discovers in the course of his medical duties, while the villain of The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings is an evil, female Italian chemist who works for a secret society, while The Sorceress of the Strand is about an amateur chemist who works doing insurance investigations who ends up repeatedly encountering one Madame Sara, an evil surgeon/physician/dentist (described in the above quotation). Ostensibly these stories are about science, but science in the world of L. T. Meade has a very occult register: there's a lot of hypnotism and gothic overtones in these stories.

They're fun enough, but not terribly amazing. A little repetitive in that Madame Sara always has some incredibly convoluted plot-- in one, she makes a woman metal teeth so she can attack someone but people will think it was a wolf-- for which there often seems to be a supernatural explanation, but the dogged investigations of Dixon (the insurance investigator) and his friend Vandeleur (a police surgeon) always make it clear it's Madame Sara's tricks at the root of it all. Sara has scientific powers, but is no scientist, I would say-- the title "sorceress" given to her by the serial's title is much more appropriate. I couldn't help but feel, though, that The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings sounded more interesting than The Sorceress of the Strand, and wished we'd got the former in its entirety and just an excerpt of the latter. Still, thank goodness that Broadview opted to reprint even just a limited selection of these long-forgotten tales.

I found this quite interesting from a historical viewpoint, but I didn't find the story that interesting, and I wasn't completely satisfied or convinced by the ending. I would have liked a little more information about what happens to Priscilla and her sisters after the story ends. Also I would have preferred it if the story had spent more time focusing on Priscilla and her friend Maggie (who was the most interesting character in the story, for me) rather than the other girls. I still found the story fairly interesting though, enough to keep me reading until the end.½

Review: A Bunch of Cherries by L. T. Meade.

I loved the story which is listed for young adults and a classic. The original book was published in 1898, one hundred and nineteen years ago. The edition I read was published on May 16th, 2012. I think I might try to find an older addition to see how much the story was edited. At some time L.T. Meade used the pseudonym name of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith. Meade (1844-1914).She was a profile writer of girl’s stories. She was the daughter of Reverend R. T. Meade of Nohoval, County Cork, Ireland. L.T.Meade was born in Bandon, Ireland and sometime later she moved to London where she married Alfred Toulmin Smith in September of 1879.

The story was enlightening just knowing that this author wrote this book over a hundred years ago. My research showed she wrote over three hundred books but I couldn’t find much on her writing style, or reviews I could read about. This was an entertaining story relating various incidents at Cherry Court School for girls. The author offered insight based on honesty, loyalty, stability and compassion. There was a young girl, Kitty at the girls school who would be finishing her last year because her father was going to India for three years and at this time he could not take her with him and he was placing her with a person she didn’t care for who lived in another town. He wasn’t able to pay for her schooling and the care she needed while he was away. He reassured Kitty that he would send for her in three years so they could be together again.

L.T. Meade showed a very characteristic example of her storytelling skills when she enhanced the story by creating the headmaster with compassion and kindness. When he heard Kitty would be leaving he talked with the teacher and told her he was going to have a competition where one child would win a scholarship for a couple of years funding at the girls school with unfair means, as the main purpose. It started with nine girls being tested and the three highest ranking girls would be placed in the main completion. Kitty was a very smart girl so he knew she would have no problem becoming one of the three competitors but his main goal was to make sure Kitty won the scholarship when the final essay was judged.

Florence Aylmer who was also chosen was poor and her Aunt no longer wanted to pay for her schooling and Mary Bateman was the third person added to the list. She wanted the scholarship so she could save her tuition money for college. However, there was some other interference going on that kept Kitty from winning. When it came to the final essay the judges, one was the schoolmaster who favored Kitty, had no choice but to give the scholarship to Florence. Did Florence really win… who did the interfering,…did the truth come out…also Kitty and Mary really wanted to win…so why weren’t they angry… would they sincerely congratulate Florence…???½

Hard to really see what makes Polly New-Fashioned. The Maybright children are all rather rambunctious and go through various adventures after the sudden death of their mother. Most seem fairly unlikely and how the father becomes blind from being out on the moor at night and being under stress is also dubious but that is way of these older novels. Not really a girls adventure tale after all but much more readable because of it.

Priscilla is classically innocent and naive, but her native honor and good nature wins her friends and helps her make the hard choices when it comes to caring for her family. It's a sweet story.½

What an odd little book! I'm still not sure just why I liked it, as I found some of the characters absurd, and the narrative rather uneven. Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that I enjoyed it, in part...

A late Victorian school story, The Girls of St. Wode's follows six young women who all find themselves attending a woman's college in England. The novel opens in the London home of Mrs. Chetwynd, who fondly hopes that her twin daughters Eileen and Marjorie, and her niece Letitia, will become society women. Her hopes are soon dashed however, when the twins make it plain that they want to be "useful" rather than fashionable women. Letitia, herself more interested in clothing and comfort, nevertheless follows the lead of her cousins.

Then there is Belle Acheson, the head-strong and scholarly daughter of Mrs. Acheson, a friend of Mrs. Chetwynd. She seems almost like a caricature of the "academic woman" as she might have been perceived in the first decade of the twentieth century. Plain looking, rather unpleasant to be around, and ludicrously attached to her notions of "the life of the mind," she dreams of founding a secular "convent" for women who want to study all their lives, and never marry.

Also thrown into the mix is Leslie Gilroy, the daughter of a cultured but impoverished widow, who is given the opportunity to attend college by a wealthy friend of the family. Finally, there is Annie Colchester, the eccentric, red-headed mathematics student intent on taking honors. Leslie's roommate at St.Wode's, Annie is hiding a "dark" secret that could ruin both herself and her new friend...

There's quite a bit going on here, and the narrative jumps around at the beginning of the novel, introducing different sets of characters before bringing them all together. The reader does not discover the real heroine of the piece until midway through the book. Meade's organization of the plot leaves something to be desired, and her more moralistic passages are somewhat overwrought, but once the girls are settled at St. Wode's, the story becomes more cohesive, and much more interesting. In fact, this middle section of the book is probably the most entertaining. When term ends, and the girls all return to London, the moralizing (now explicitly religious) begins again, and the reader struggles on to the inevitable conclusion.

In addition to the character of Belle, who - if I didn't know the author was in deadly earnest - would strike me almost as a parody, I had a difficult time understanding Eileen and Marjorie, whose thinking seemed a little muddled. The religious conclusion (everyone prays, and things turn out OK) seemed a little forced, but was no doubt in line with the conventions governing this type of literature. But despite the fact that The Girls of St. Wodes was not entirely successful, there were moments of real interest and enjoyment, a fact that has decided me in favor of trying another story by L.T. Meade.

This book is really quite ridiculous, from start to finish, and I enjoyed every melodramatic minute of it! First published in 1886, it is an early example of the girls' school story (though by no means the earliest!), and one can detect certain themes - the adoration for the wise headmistress, the illicit midnight feast, the false accusation and assumed guilt of an innocent girl, the self-sacrificing nobility of the wrongly accused, and the near-fatal illness which brings about the necessary climax and turn-about to the tale - that would continue to appear with some frequency in the genre, into the Edwardian era and beyond. Some themes, by contrast - the emphasis on religious devotion and prayer, the sermonizing of both headmistress and local vicar, the forbidden "racy" novel (which, in a scene that simply delighted me, turned out to be one of my own personal favorites, Jane Eyre!) - had more of the feeling of the nineteenth century, and would slowly fall from popularity, save in evangelistic works. This combination, of themes that would later be more fully developed, and those that would largely fall out of use, gives A World of Girls: The Story of a School something of the feeling of a transition piece, which only adds to its charms. Informed readers will realize that Meade's work stands as a kind of bridge between old and new, and will find it all the more fascinating.

The story itself is full of twists and turns, and like The Girls of St. Wode's (the only other Meade title I have thus far read), begins with one heroine as its narrative focus, and concludes with a second. One wonders if this were a peculiarity of Meade's style, or something commonly to be found in popular fiction of the time. In any case, the tale opens as young Hester Thornton, still in mourning for the death of her mother, bids her beloved baby sister Nan goodbye and unwillingly departs for Lavender House, a boarding school in Sefton, run by one Mrs. Willis. There, an unlucky first encounter with the irrepressible Annie Forest - a somewhat wild, but goodhearted girl, whose charm and vivacity had made her the favorite of the school, despite her flaws - leaves Hester with a firm conviction that this fellow pupil was "a horrid, vulgar, low-bred girl," and sets in motion an antagonistic relationship with unforeseen results for the entire school.

What follows is an entertaining tale of school-girl rivalries, schemes, adventures, and scrapes, eventually culminating with the crisis and heart-break necessary to teach everyone (well, almost everyone) the error of their ways. Illicit novels are confiscated (oh, Jane Eyre!), school-girl property is destroyed, false accusations are made, and suspicions are aroused. Into this mix comes baby Nan, whose innocent love for Annie exacerbates the problem, causing Hester to be wildly jealous of her darling (the sister left in her care by her dying mother!), and Annie (resentful of unjust treatment!) to be deliberately provocative. Naturally, accident and brain fever can't be far behind, in this situation, but even these dramatic contretemps are put in the shade by the appearance of nefarious gypsy woman Mother Rachel, and the kidnapping of baby Nan!

If this all sounds distinctly absurd, it is. I was very conscious of (and amused by) its melodrama, and also of its heavy-handed religious sentiment, as I was reading. I was also wincing, as ever, at the all-too common inclusion of baby-snatching gypsies in the story. I really should start keeping a list... That said, if one can accept that it is very much a product of its time - and it doesn't, in my view, transcend that time as some works do - it is actually quite enjoyable. I was surprised to find how very much I liked it, despite the above criticisms, especially since I didn't appreciate The Girls of St. Wode's (my only other foray into Meade's work) nearly as much. Definitely one that school-story fans will want to read, as I think it captures an important moment in the evolution of the genre, and is also this prolific author's most well-known title, A World of Girls is a book that, when approached on its own terms, has much to offer. I think I may have to track down the sequel, Red Rose and Tiger Lily.

Copyrighted in 1891, this was a childhood gift from my mother to me. (I was born in 1923, not sure when she gave it to me. I know I read it many many times!)

The family of this book was nothing like my own. . . They were wealthy and had servants. Ermengarde, Marjorie, and Basil, the main characters, have younger siblings. Their mother is dead and their father and aunt leave most of the children's affairs in the hands of Miss Nelson, their governess.

**I was amazed to find how well I remembered all the twists and turns of the plot as I reread its 275 pages recently. (Illustrations by Everard Hopkins also were well-remembered.)

Precious story that I believe families today could be especially convicted by. Search for this story about a beautiful, free-spirited young girl and her preoccupied parents.

Marion Zimmer Bradley once told me she loved L.T. Meade's school girl stories when she was young. I said I only knew Meade's mysteries. She said that was natural (since I was a man).

Quick, girly read about a girl's school and it's residents.

Barbara's ambition leads her astray; she leaves the company of her merry sisters and is very naughty, but everything turns out happily in the end (sigh!. She manages to avoid becoming a New Woman - masculine and sophisticated - and goes back to live merrily with her merry sisters on their own dairy farm.

An enjoyable book and not too sentimental or sanctimonious.

Inscribed: Hulda from Grandma Barrows, Dec. 12, 1912

My great-aunt. It has a "Gibson Girl" type picture on the cover - and I can't wait to read it!