white_hart (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
white_hart) wrote2019-02-24 04:23 pm
white_hart) wrote2019-02-24 04:23 pm
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Reading: The School on the Moor
The second Dorita Fairlie Bruce novel that antisoppist lent me, The School on the Moor was first published in 1931, much closer to Nancy at St Bride's than That Boarding School Girl, and I think that showed in more subtlety of characterisation, and a sense of place and landscape that was absent from That Boarding School Girl (although that may just have been due to the Dartmoor setting, rather than more humdrum Surrey).
I thought The School on the Moor was great fun, if frankly quite astoundingly silly in places; two key plotlines concern an escaped convict (and it strikes me as demonstrating quite breathtaking amounts of upper-middle-class privilege to assume that the obvious answer for a young man wrongfully convicted of fraud is for him to escape from prison and, with the collusion of a friend with a private plane, flee the country to take up farming in Africa - seriously, where to even start with that one?) and searching for the Ark of the Covenant on Dartmoor. There's also a friendship between the central character, Toby, and another girl which I simply could not read in any way other than through a queer lens, and while there were a couple of quite jarring examples of period-typical casual racism I generally liked it a lot.
antisoppist lent me, The School on the Moor was first published in 1931, much closer to Nancy at St Bride's than That Boarding School Girl, and I think that showed in more subtlety of characterisation, and a sense of place and landscape that was absent from That Boarding School Girl (although that may just have been due to the Dartmoor setting, rather than more humdrum Surrey).I thought The School on the Moor was great fun, if frankly quite astoundingly silly in places; two key plotlines concern an escaped convict (and it strikes me as demonstrating quite breathtaking amounts of upper-middle-class privilege to assume that the obvious answer for a young man wrongfully convicted of fraud is for him to escape from prison and, with the collusion of a friend with a private plane, flee the country to take up farming in Africa - seriously, where to even start with that one?) and searching for the Ark of the Covenant on Dartmoor. There's also a friendship between the central character, Toby, and another girl which I simply could not read in any way other than through a queer lens, and while there were a couple of quite jarring examples of period-typical casual racism I generally liked it a lot.
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It also provides more information on the future lives of two characters who are a subplot in Dimsie Moves Up Again though it is sad that, as ever, the answer to their future lives is for one to marry the other's brother.
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Are the Dimsie characters Lesley and Ursula? I wondered if they had wandered in from one of her other books, as such a thing was made of the name of their school. (And what is it with marrying friends' brothers? Is it just a reflection of how narrow most girls' lives were, or are they all secretly sublimating their feelings for their friends into feelings for their brothers?)