The Bodleian Library Girls High Jinks collection

I thought I'd do some research into the books pictured on the cover of the journal/sketch book I bought:



From my first bit of research, these are English press publications from around a century ago and on.
There are six shelves. This is the list from the top shelf:

The Girl Who Lost Things, Lena Tyack
Warne's Top-All Book for Girls
Winning and Waiting - Pilgrim Press
Modern Daughter, Maria Steuart
A Willful Girl, Helen S. Griffith
The Youngest Girl in the Fifth
The Girls of Dormitory Ten
No Ordinary Girl, Mary ... - Blackie and Son
A Very Naughty Girl
The Jollies Term o* Record, Angela Bra* - Blackie
A Go-Ahead Schoolgirl
The Abbey Girls Go Back to School
The Worst Girl in the School
A Girl of Distinction

The Girl Who Lost Things, Lena Tyack

Published 1913 by Partridge in London .

surprisingly many iterations for being suffocatingly scarce now.





online edition: https://archive.org/details/girlwholostthing00tyac/page/n10

Warne's Top-All Book for Girls, edited by Mary England

Frederick Warne & Co. 1920s, 1930, 1939, 1943

1936 edition contains : Pandora the Prig, Peggy Carr; Out Of Bounds, A.E. Seymour; The Girl Who Had Too Many Friends, Mary Gervaise; Christmas At The Towers, M.C. Field; A Mixed Scent, Bessie Marchant; The Spies, Grace Golden; Out On Ben Corrig, Nancy Firle. With colour and black and white illustrations.



I count 8 different dustjackets easily. This was probably regularly published with a new set of stories.



There is also a set for boys.

Winning and Waiting - Pilgrim Press

Possibly this one : WINNING AND WAITING: THE STORY OF A VILLAGE AND CITY.

TIDDEMAN, L. E.

Published by The Pilgrim Press, London, 1910

Description:

8vo. pp vii, 280. Frontispiece and 5 plates. Cover illustration shows lady and gentleman on cliff top in Victorian dress waiting for a couple below.

Ah, the next is Modern Daughters, plural, not singular. Author Maria Steuart

The only bit I can find is the image posted by the Bodleian Library shop:



Most obscure.

A Willful Girl, Helen S. Griffith

Possibly the 1902 Her Willful Way, by Helen Sherman Griffith. Which has been picked up by reprint companies. Can't find an original cover under either title.

Here is a close-up of the spine:

http://nelsonline.demotesturl.net/media/catalog/product/cache/1/small_image/210x...

Ha! I'm the only owner of Her Willful Way on LT, and I've got it tagged for scanning. I wonder where it might reside in my house....

The Youngest Girl in the Fifth, by Angela Brazil, is thankfully well represented on LT, with 37 copies. I can't find the publication date, but the publisher is Blackie and Son, London.

Illustrator: Stanley Davis (author page needs work)

Probably the original cover:



There is a dust jacket that is lovely too:



There is also a later cover, probably from the 40s, which has little artistic merit.

available at Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21687...

>5 2wonderY: Maria Steuart, Modern Daughters

COPAC, the union catalogue for many UK national, academic and specialist libraries, busy re-branding itself as Library Hub Discover (what committee came up with THAT?), lists three copies, at Oxford, Cambridge and the BL:

https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/search?q=Modern+Daughters+Maria+Steuart
Between them they come up with:

Maria Steuart, Modern Daughters, published London : S.W. Partridge, n.d. (1914, 1915 or 1915?)

P.S. How DO you display square brackets in a message, and stop them trying to create a touchstone?

The Girls of Dormitory Ten, by Betty Laws was published by Cassell & Co Ltd. in 1926.

The illustrator is P. B. Hickling.

There are two pictorial hardcover versions





and a dust jacket

No Ordinary Girl, Mary ... - Blackie and Son

I must have had to guess at the author's name from the image.

Bessie Marchant is who comes up when I Google it.

AbeBooks uk notes - No date but inscription at front dated April, 1935.



Another site has a red cover with a dark-haired girl riding a donkey side-saddle, and lists the sub-title as "A Story Of Central America."

Here's the Bodleian spine image



ETA a description and publishing date -1907.

After Daisy Kennard graduates from her Canadian school with honors, she takes a teaching job in Panama. She hopes to be able to learn more about her mother and father who died there, and also about her sister who disappeared at the same time.

>8 Cynfelyn:

& # 91 (remove the spaces before and after the #) = left square bracket
& # 93 (remove the spaces before and after the #) = right square bracket

or just put \ before each of the square brackets which gives you \ \

>8 Cynfelyn: and >11 Taphophile13: Ah, welcome and thanks for pitching in!

L. T. Meade was a prolific writer (her Wikipedia page lists 315 titles), and her books are still widely available.

A Very Naughty Girl was published in 1901.



I doubt these Amazon covers will stay, but I'll try

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61ghqAEp45L._SL500_SX338_BO1,20...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51PXXwqETwL._SX258_BO1,204,203,...

Here's the Gutenberg edition: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36853

The Jollies Term o* Record, Angela Bra* - Blackie

is actually The Jolliest Term on Record, author is Angela Brazil. I was peering at the very tiny print and missed the connection to >7 2wonderY:.

Balliol Salmon illustrated it. It was published in 1915.

Very pretty cover



and a dust jacket



Gutenberg edition: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33910

Elsie J. Oxenham was also prolific, and we will meet her more than once on these shelves.

A Go-Ahead Schoolgirl is the first in a short series about a school named Rocklands.

Yikes! It's offered for sale at £140.00.

1919 publishing date. Illustrator is Harold C. Earnshaw.

Well, we didn't have to wait long to meet up with Oxenham again.

The Abbey Girls Go Back To School is in her popular and extensive Abbey school series.

It was published in 1922 and illustrated by Elsie Wood.





The Abbey School series has it's own Wikipedia page, which I've added to the author page.

Amy Amelia Mary Irvine, A. M. Irvine, seems to have specialized in trouble-makers, judging from her titles.

The Worst Girl in the School was published in 1920. Illustrations by John E. Sutcliffe, but the covers are not pictorial.

They are pretty, though:

We've met Bessie Marchant at >10 2wonderY:. Her girls adventure across the entire world.

A Girl of Distinction: A Tale of the Karroo is placed in South Africa.

Published in 1912, illustrated by William Rainey.

The only cover image I could locate was uploaded by an LT member -

Shelf 2 has multiple repeats, so the list may be shorter:

Two Girls and a Secret, E. E. Cowper
A Girl of High Adventure, L. T. Meade
A Courageous Girl, Bessie Marchant
A ???? Friendship, Alice Stry**?
An Incorrigible Girl
Eight Girls and Their Adventures, Isabel S. Robs***
Queen of the Dormitory, Angela Brazil
The Madcap of the School, Angela Brazil
Gal's Gossip

What a wonderful project! Thanks for all your hard work tracking down these gorgeous covers and sharing them with us. I have several of Angela Brazil's books in the original editions with the printed boards and they look so good on the shelf.

I keep stumbling across this person's blog in my research and just spent a little time seeing what he's all about:

http://furrowedmiddlebrow.blogspot.com/2014/12/update-school-story-authors-c.htm...

He refers to a book, Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories by Sue Sims and Hilary Clare.
That looks very absorbing.

Two Girls and a Secret, published ~1913.

E. E. Cowpers Edith Elise; and I can't find much about her beyond birth and death years.

And we meet with L. T. Meade again. Not surprising. I have two titles by her, but haven't read them yet. Her full name is Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Toulmin Smith, and she was Irish.

A Girl of High Adventure was published in 1914. I'm not finding a description of the story, but you can read it at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/girlofhighadvent00mead

Two covers



and this much nicer one



Charles L. Wrenn contributed several illustrations.

>21 2wonderY: Girls Gone By Press will be revising and updating a new edition of the Encyclopedia of Girls' School Stories, with a new edition to come in 2020. Should I send you a link to where you can pre-order volume 1?

Michelle J. Smith devotes a chapter to Bessie Marchant in her book, Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture. And many of Marchant's titles appear to be referenced in Victorian Settler Narratives: Emigrants, Cosmopolitans and Returnees in Nineteenth-Century Literature

I saw a fleeting reference that Marchant writes from personal knowledge of her settings, though her Wikipedia page claims she never left England. Someone has done extensive research on her books and posted many short descriptions of the plot and main character on the Wikipedia page.

A Courageous Girl: A Story of Uruguay was published in 1909.

Anne returns home to Uruguay after years at school in England, only to find that father has sold their beautiful home, and has taken a job managing the shepherds on the sheep ranch that used to be theirs.

Amazon seems to be the only source of good cover images Let's see if clicking takes us to them.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41M8nl0p0lL._SX369_BO1,204,203,...

and

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51EZx%2Bz6nPL._SY344_BO1,204,20...

here is a poorer image of the first:

>24 Sakerfalcon: Yes!

I haven't had any luck with the next puzzle yet. Reserving this space for future discussion of

A ???? Friendship, Alice Stry**?

The print may be too small, but I haven't tried a magnifying glass yet.

Ha! The Bodleian Libraries are selling a 2020 calendar, and I was able to use their image magnifier to read the spine print.

A Newnham Friendship, by Alice Stronach.

Another LT member has already gleaned more about this author than I could find elsewhere. She attended Newnham College at Cambridge University for a year (1887-1888) and was a schoolteacher at Mull, Inner Hebrides, Scotland.
This book was published in 1901. Can't tell if it is fiction or memoir.

This is the cover, though the spine color in the shelf picture is lush red with gilt flowers



Oh. And Harold Copping is the illustrator.

An Incorrigible Girl was published in 1899 by The Religious Tract Society.

Mary Helena Cornwall Legh was later an Anglican missionary to Japan and spent many years caring for a colony of lepers.

From an advertisement of the time: This tale traces the development of a strong girl-nature, under the influence of a loving teacher, from a state of wild freedom to a condition of willing submission to responsibility.

It's got a brilliantly pretty cover



also found in green, and possibly the older cover

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41p63wVixsL._SY344_BO1,204,203,...

Eight Girls and Their Adventures, Isabel S. Robs***

The author is Isabel Suart Robson and the subtitle is "or, the house in Harford Place."

Published in 1916.

WorldCat lists 20 titles for Robson; but not this title. I'm coming up blank today on author details and a cover image, though I thought I'd struck one yesterday evening while at home.

Ah! This is likely also published as The Fortunes of Eight.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/The-Fortunes-of-Eight-Isabel-Suart-Robson-Partridge-Har...

Robson's other covers are pictorial and interesting.

Another two by Angela Brazil

Queen of the Dormitory was published 1926. P. B. Hickling contributed several illustrations.

A member has contributed the nicest cover to be found.

The Madcap of the School seems to have been picked up for reprinting more than once. It was first published 1917, is available as a print on demand, and can be found at the Internet Archive and Gutenberg Project. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28749



and several dust jackets. Here's one

Gal's Gossip, probably a collection of short stories. There is also More Gal's Gossip, with a different publisher's imprint (Pitcher's), but the same editor.



correction. Further looking leans me toward Arthur M. Binstead being the author, not the editor.

Both of those titles were collected into The Works of Arthur Binstead

>26 2wonderY: Here you go!
Girls Gone By Books

I know we've talked about girls' school stories before in this group. The series that comes to mind readily is the Chalet School books, that seem to have had more of a Canadian sales market.

Not coming up with USA series. Is that because US girls were much less likely to have been sent away to school? So a culture of boarding schools is both European and English.

I feel so provincial in my knowledge of this question.

Third shelf leads off with repeats.
Here is what is new:

A Beautiful Possibility, Edith Ferguson Black
Little Miss Sunshine, Gabrielle E. Jackson
Winning and Waiting, author not shown, Pilgrim Press (Whoops! Already discussed in >4 2wonderY:.)
A Girl's Kingdom
* *irl ***rade, Blackie & Son, spine shows a girl at a typewriter
Bunty of Dormitory B, F. Mary Tyler

>34 2wonderY: I can't attest to this for sure, but certainly the working classes in America didn't send their daughters to boarding school. Or sons, for that matter. Perhaps wealthier families in the cities, especially on the east coast, or up-and-coming merchant families did so, but most of America was of the rural working class. Trying to tame a wild land, ya know?

A Beautiful Possibility, by Edith Ferguson Black.

For all of the reprints and online copies available, it was difficult to get much information about Black or the book.

Black is Canadian (thank you LT member tag!), and CWRC (Canadian Writing ??) has rescued her from oblivion.

Here's the only original cover I could find



online edition: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10037

Not even finding an original publishing date, but this shocking description of the first illustration:

Illustration: LOUIS DASHED THE GLOWING END OF HIS CIGAR IN THE NEGRO'S FACE.

eta
Well, that was helpful... I added the book to preserve the cover, since it was from ebay and will eventually disappear. I struck it right and found a first edition:

London, The "Leisure hour" library office 1908

Little Miss Sunshine, Gabrielle E. Jackson

Not discovering much about Jackson besides this is her married name and she was born in New York City.

I have another of her titles.



Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/littlemisssunshi00jack

The book begins interestingly:

Those who had known him longest recalled just when and how the name of Gosh darn Davis attached itself to him, and attach it did to stick like a burr. In the little hamlet where he had dwelt for the past fifty years he was always spoken of by that name. In the village a few miles beyond, where he went almost daily to do his tradin', and even in the Hub, to which he drove each alternate Saturday with his farm produce he was spoken of by this uneuphonious title.

Check out my additions in >27 2wonderY:.

I used the same technique to read the spine of A Girl's Kingdom.

The author is M. Corbet-Seymour. She is much more prolific than represented on LT. WorldCat lists 20 titles.

A Girl's Kingdom was published 1897 by Blackie & Son.

G. Demain Hammond contributed 4 illustrations.

Here's the 2020 Bodleian calendar.

You'll see it only borrows some of our books.

I'm striking out with this one

* *irl ***rade, Blackie & Son, spine shows a girl at a typewriter

The print is not small, it has been nearly rubbed out from wear.

guessing

A Girl
O* *rades (Trades?)

The author's name is almost completely gone.

Bunty of Dormitory B is hard to research. Mostly pictures of old dorm rooms and references to Mary Tyler Moore get in the way.



This and the other title by F. Mary Tyler were both published in 1929.

Fourth shelf contains only one book not featured above

A Ripping Girl, May Baldwin

No new books on shelves five and six, though a couple are newly front cover out.

Again, an LT member has gathered valuable author information.

May Baldwin was born in India, of English parents, schooled in Germany before settling in England.

"An accomplished linguist, and a prolific author of girls' school stories, Baldwin's work - according to Sue Sims' and Hilary Clare's The Encyclopedia of Girls' School Stories - is far less nationalistic than that of other early contributors to the genre, perhaps owing to her own international education, and frequent travel to see her many friends, worldwide."

Her stories, just looking at the titles, cover school life around Europe and parts of Africa.

A Ripping Girl was published in 1914.

An LT member description:

"Spirited teenager Sackville "Sacky" Nicholson moves into an old manor house with her widowed mother to prove they can live independently of her disapproving grandparents."



No online editions.

The illustrator was Gordon Browne.

>42 2wonderY: I'm not able to see this image? You are certainly finding some fine covers!

>45 MrsLee: Had to save it my computer first; not sure why.

Sadly, there are approximately 90 books pictured on those shelves, but with picture manipulation, there are only 29 titles. Kind of a waste. There are so many tattered titles that could have been included.

Found one for you! Girl Comrades by Ethel P. Heddle:

https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Comrades-Ethel-P-Heddle/dp/B004X1LVO6

Will keep looking; I bought the jigsaw puzzle and was thinking of doing this very thing, so you saved me a TON of time ;-> Thanks from the John Curtis Free Library, Hanover, MA

>48 BiblioDame: Welcome! You found us awfully fast. Did this thread show up in a Google search? Hope you add some books to your catalog and join in the talk.