A good friend of mine here in the U.K. has taken on an insanely demanding job working as a manager for the National Health Service. She isn’t the type to complain — and I think she does actually enjoy the work — but the stress and long hours have had a notable effect on her leisure habits. When she watches TV, she wants short, upbeat programs like Scrubs. When it comes to online videos, she wants to watch hilariously cranky turtles chasing cats. And when it comes to reading, she wants to slip back into the literary equivalent of comfort food: girls’ books, and most particularly the girls’ books she read when she was growing up.
All this Anne-of-Green-Gablesing has got me thinking about the girls’ books I used to read as a kid. Here are some of my favorite examples of the most popular genres.
1. The Ballet and Stage School Books
At the risk of having my queer card taken away, I have to admit that I loved these books. I went on dreaming that I was going to be a ballerina long after I’d given up actual ballet lessons. And I still love watching ballet, musicals and contemporary dance, even if I’ve reluctantly come to realize that, truthfully, I find standing by the barre for hours and doing exercises a little boring.
The British writer Noel Streatfeild, author of Ballet Shoes, is, obviously, one of the queens of this genre. As an early teen, though, the ballet books that I loved (and that my father relentlessly teased me for loving) were Jean Estoril‘s Drina books.
If you’ve read this series — which is eleven books long, and follows Drina Adams from her first ballet lessons at age nine, to her triumphant debut as lead ballerina with a major company, plus wedding at age 18 (which seems awfully young, in retrospect, for such a major commitment) — you’ll know that she dances everywhere: in Exile, in Paris, in Italy, in Madeira, in New York, in Switzerland. Yes, these books are schlocky. But in their defense, the author was obviously a well-traveled woman who loved the places she was writing about — and she did give me a long-standing taste for travel, even if not for ballet classes.
If all this talk of ballet gives you a rash, though, there are always what might be called the anti-ballet-book ballet books: Jahnna N. Malcolm‘s Bad News Ballet series, about five girls who loathe the ballet classes they are forced into, and who refer to their snobby, skinny, ballet-mad classmates as “the Bunheads.”
2. The Horse Books
No doubt Freud would have something to say about the popularity of “pony books” for girls, but whatever he had to say, I doubt it would apply to me. I was never actually that interested in horses in and of themselves — which is just as well, since my parents couldn’t have afforded a pony if I’d wanted one. But there were a few horse-themed books that I enjoyed. One was National Velvet, which — besides being made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor — is actually a really good, genuinely literary novel, about a strange, spacey girl called Velvet and her strong, silent mother who once swam the English Channel.
The others were a series of nine “Jill” books by Ruby Ferguson, about a girl called Jill and her two ponies. I don’t know if these books have ever been published in America, but if they have, they probably seem hilariously bizarre to American readers. Mostly written in the 1950s, they are very old-fashioned and English: full of vicars, village fetes, horsey upper class people, and “oh, I say, Mildred” heartiness and emotional repression. But they are intentionally funny as well as unintentionally so, and I loved them.
3. The Boarding School Books
If you want really old-fashioned English emotional repression, look no further than Enid Blyton‘s Malory Towers and St. Clare’s books, all about the frightfully decent, sports-mad, strangely sexless girls at a couple of English boarding schools in the 1940s.
According to Wikipedia, these books have never really caught on in America — and I can’t honestly say I’m surprised — but they are hugely famous in England. Since Wikipedia also informs me that Malory Towers has become notorious for its lesbian subtext — to the point of earning a mention on Sugar Rush — it’s possible that I should go back and read them again.
Personally, though, I preferred the endless number of Chalet School books by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, about the endless number of pupils at an international boarding school in Austria in the first half of the 20th century. My memory of these books has grown hazy with time, but I still remember something about the pupils having to speak English on Monday, French on Tuesday, and German on Wednesday. I also remember them doing lots of skiing, and having a regularly scheduled break for for coffee and cakes, which they Germanically referred to as “Kaffee und Kuchen.” All of which still seems to me indescribably awesome.
The girls’ boarding school story seems to be more of an English than an American genre. But there is one American book I love: Susan Coolidge‘s ridiculously brilliant What Katy Did at School, first published in 1873 and in print ever since. Besides the fact that I am still in love with Rose Red, there are all the chapters on secret societies, not to mention the one where Katy and Clover receive a Christmas box from home filled with parcels of lovingly described food: jumbles and ginger snaps and crullers and frosted plum cake. Speaking of which, I am now hungry.
4. The Orphan/Family Books
By “orphan/family,” I mean either books about (often large) families that are already established, or books about an orphan girl finding a family. Canada’s L. M. Montgomery
is, of course, pretty much queen of the latter category, with her Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon books, all of which I read avidly.
A good modern example about a girl searching for a home is Cynthia Voigt‘s 1981 story Homecoming, which kicked off her Tillerman cycle, about tomboy Dicey trying to find a place for her and her younger siblings to stay after their mother abandons them.
In terms of books about established families, I liked Sydney Taylor‘s All of a Kind Family series, about five sisters growing up in a Lower East Side tenement in New York at the beginning of the 20th century.
Once again, food seems to play a disproportionately large part in my recollection of these books. Isn’t there a chapter in the first one full of smoked fish and frankfurters and pickles and chickpeas, as the five girls accompany their mother to market? Speaking of which, I am now hungrier.
Finally, of course, there was
Beverly Cleary‘s Ramona Quimby — whom Radar magazine recently “outed” as a childhood icon they were sure grew up into a lesbian — although I have to say, young as I was, I don’t remember getting that from the books. Note to Radar magazine: Sometimes a bowl cut is just a bowl cut. My best female friend in school had a bowl cut, and she grew up to be a raving heterosexual. I had (and still have) long hair, and … well … look at me.
5. The Adventure/Pioneer Girl Books
Americans rule this category. In England, we have the omnipresent Enid Blyton’s stories about the Famous Five — one of whose members is the proto-transgender George — but their adventures mostly consisted of highly improbable things like discovering smuggled treasure. When it comes to pioneering in the U.K., well, you can “pioneer” your way from one leafy village to another, I suppose, but it’s not exactly going to be highly exciting. Americans, on the other hand, have Laura Ingalls Wilder — whose youthful adventures, as I recollect them, involve cyclone cellars, wheels of fire, plagues of locusts, malaria and running with some wild ponies. Bring it on, Laura.
Are there genres or favorite books of yours that I’ve left out? Let me know in the comments.
