Island to Abbey: Survival and Sanctuary in the Books of Elsie J Oxenham, 1907 to 1959

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Island to Abbey: Survival and Sanctuary in the Books of Elsie J Oxenham, 1907 to 1959", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 7, pp. 636-638. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710776114

Interest in children's literature of the past is reflected in a substantial body of critical and historical writing on it, from Harvey Darton to Peter Hunt. Early children's books appeal to many different constituencies, from book collectors and bibliographers to readers who want to understand better the history of the subject and those who want to go down memory lane to books they read as children. As Spufford said, we are in part made up of what we read. Within early, as in modern, children's books, there are recognizable genres, like school stories, books for girls and boys, adventure and romance and so forth. These have been popular over a very long time, even before the present time. This is why it is both useful and interesting to go back in time to a relatively neglected area of early 20th‐century books for children, and the age of writers like Angela Brazil and Elinor Brent‐Dyer, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elsie Jeanette Oxenham. Primary literature here tends to be scarce, mainly antiquarian, or exist in unusual reprint or facsimile forms, while secondary literature (writers like Quigley and Avery) are now generally the preserve of specialists (including special collections librarians and scholars).

Island to Abbey is an examination of the large output of fiction written and published by Elsie Jeanette Oxenham (“EJO”) between Goblin Island in 1907 and Two Queens at the Abbey in 1959 (the final one in a series of 40 books about the “Abbey”, largely school stories but also more widely stories for girls and young women). The floruit years for these are the decades of the 1920s to the 1940s, and, like the work of Violet Needham and Enid Blyton and G.A. Henty, they represent publishing phenomena in their own right. With the “Abbey” and other series, EJO wove exciting plots about friendships frustrated and resolved, continually introducing new characters, catching contemporary interests like the Camp Fire Movement (a parallel to guiding) and folk dancing, setting her stories in settings that became as familiar to her readers as those of romances and soaps today, and taking many of her main characters from outsiders to the happiness of marriage.

Her books seemed dated by the 1950s, but were precursors to the outburst of teenage writing in the 1960s and 1970s, when more realistic themes and issues came to dominate. Even so, her stories put girls first, kept up momentum through a complex inter‐linked story‐arc, play an important role in the history of school stories, and critically make an interesting point of comparison with writers like Richmal Crompton and P.G. Wodehouse. Along with other such writers, she presents practitioners with that disorientating challenge of asking whether history matters to current reading and whether critical and academic study matters to current practice. Island to Abbey is so called because of recurring motifs of survival and sanctuary in EJO's books. The study originated as a private publication in 1985 and then 1996, and has been extended and revised for this 2006 version from Girls Gone By Publishers (who have also republished authors like Elinor Brent‐Dyer, Monica Edwards, and Malcolm Saville). The authors, Stella Waring and Sheila Ray, are both librarians who read EJO when young and have retained a professional interest since. Sheila Ray will be known to readers through her work for Bookbird, a study of Enid Blyton, and contributions (including on school stories) to Hunt's encyclopedia.

Inevitably comparison will be made between Island to Abbey and Monica Godfrey's The World of Elsie Jeanette Oxenham and Her Books (Girls Gone By Publishers, 2003). Godfrey explains how EJO's life and love of places and friendships came through in her many books, providing a helpful biographical framework for an understanding of her work. Godfrey also devotes several chapters to bibliographical matters – EJO's many publishers (Collins, Muller, SPCK, Harrap), her illustrators, the editions (not only first but the many reprints, the short stories, the prequels by Doris Acland, to works published after EJO died in 1960). Island to Abbey provides a narrative complement to this approach, highlighting more the many story‐lines of the numerous books (many synopses are provided), opening up critical perspectives, and celebrating the books as literature and nostalgia.

Like Godfrey, they admit that it is easy to criticize the conventions and assumptions of such writing – the moralizing, the class‐consciousness, the allegedly tacit lesbianism, the view that marriage was a girl's destination, no mention of external events like the war, the decline into a tired formula. Island to Abbey also provides black‐and‐white and colour illustrations, helping to give it collector‐appeal. A specialist book for any collection seriously sourcing the study of early children's literature and its cultural history context, as well as a nice gift for the personal collector and addict.

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