Jean of Storms

Spine and corners bumped.

Although Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's fans include thousands of adult women in countries as far apart as Australia and the USA, until recently it was thought that she had written only for younger readers and had never made use in fiction of her native South Tyneside background. But the chance discovery of Jean of Storms, originally serialised in the Shields Gazette in 1930, has revealed not only a full-length adult novel, but one set in the district around South Shields, where she herself grew up. As the first new Brent-Dyer novel to be published for 26 years, its appearance in book form has been eagerly awaited by fans since it was found in 1995 by a South Shields librarian, Doris Johnson.

Unlike Brent-Dyer's Chalet School stories, Jean of Storms is a domestic tale - although it does, inevitably, include one of the dramatic rescue scenes which characterise the Chalet School series. In many ways it is a poignant story, dealing as it does with the lives of three women during their brief period of independence between leaving school and getting married. Their bond of friendship is strong enough to enable Oona and Jean to bring up two orphaned sisters, - after fighting to protect the welfare of the older - for Molly to escape from a tyrannical landlady as well as earning a living teaching folk-dancing, and for Jean to resist the religious tyranny of her servant Morag.

However, Brent-Dyer clearly saw the ending, when the women's circle is broken, as inevitable and preferable to their lives together. Molly and Jean marry a curate and doctor respectively (all Chalet School heroines marry doctors) and raise children with their husbands, while the older Oona, whose chance of marriage vanished when her fiancé was killed in the First World War, has her independence and enjoyment of life permanently affected by a back injury.