Help! The Chalet School has stolen my brain!

[elen_nare]

Q1: Given a person who is obsessively reading every Chalet School book (boarding school stories for girls, published 1925-1970) she can get her hands on, and gleefully enjoying them, estimate her age.

Q2: Knowing she is, with equal delight, writing slash fic about the mistresses, revise that estimate.

...

Seriously, these books - and the resultant fic - have taken over my brain. I've already posted the first two I wrote here (Pretence of Decorum and Swiss Mail), and I'm currently writing, and posting on a fandom-specific forum, a new multi-chapter one. I've never written multi-chapter fics before! The people in the forum are really nice, though, and I'm having fun writing it. I'll cross-post once it's done :)

As for the pairings, I defy anyone who's read the books to tell me it's impossible to read Hilda Annersley & Nell Wilson, and/or Kathie Ferrars & Nancy Wilmot, as couples :P
I'm perfectly aware that's almost certainly not the reading the author intended, but I think it's fairly plausible, and I like it.

(This post was brought to you by sleepy Elen who is sleepy and had more to say but is too sleepy to remember it!)

Comments

[bluealoe]

Hmmm, judging by the first two questions, my answer is that you're around 25? :)

I've been meaning to respond to the stories you posted, just haven't had a chance yet. but I did read them, and while I've never heard of the fandom before, I did like them. :) I look forward to reading your chaptered fic!

[thisbluespirit]

Hi - I was adding a couple of people to my flist who I've had interesting conversations with and share tiny fandoms with, and that it seemed silly not to friend, so have friended you. I hope that is okay?

Anyway, having recently done a big re-read of the Chalet School books, I'd have to agree with you. I really enjoyed your Miss Wilson & Miss Annersley fics. I tend to have quite a complicated view of those two, though, but yes - it is very hard to read certain "friendships" in this book without shipping them and wondering, even if Elinor never intended it, whether in her long associations with various schools she was inadvertently recording some rl lesbian relationships...? Probably not, but I did wonder on this re-read.

Anyway, I'd agree about the shipping - it's very hard not to read Kathie/Nancy as thing (they're very free with the endearments, and the whole school knows Nancy will be upset if Kathie is ill), Nell Wilson/Constance Stewart (if they'd stop sharing beds and running down corridors hand in hand, maybe not, but they do) and then Rosalie - even as a child who was utterly oblivious to such subtexts in the usual way, I couldn't help reading it as a romance in some way between her and Tom and that really is how it's structured, plot-wise.

I fluctuate a lot with Nell and Hilda, though, but they are the characters I love the best these days. I ended up shipping them much more literally this time round, but I still hesitate as to how much. (I kind of wonder if I'm still somewhere at a very deep friendship/platonic love, but Nell being in love - with her history with Con Stewart suggesting that she is gay/bi-sexual, but maybe Hilda isn't. And then I read some of the descriptions of them and ship them uncomplicatedly anyway. Mind, I'm still shocked when they smoke in canon. :lol:) Anyway, I did a lot more shipping of everyone this time round. There are - for all the protests that they don't do that sort of thing - a lot of crushes various girls seem to have on each other. Jo really does seem to have a thing about how pretty Gillian Linton is, which is quite funny.


(Anyway, the short version of this was: I have friended you and am always happy to talk about CS. But I think that's now pretty obvious.)