My pre-book sale warmup: A mini Girls Gone B[u]y-ing spree

My mental peregrination distracted me a couple of days ago from reporting on the rest of my pre-book sale warm-up shopping.  But with the big book sale coming up tomorrow night, I figured I should hurry up and share it with you before I have even more book shopping to report on.

So here is the story:

Once upon a time, TurboTax offered a special 5% bonus on any $100 increment of my income tax refund, IF I took it in the form of an Amazon gift certificate.  Now, what book lover could possibly resist such an offer—especially if they weren't expecting a refund to begin with? What is more fun than "found money" used for buying books, and even an extra 5% bonus on top of the found money?

Needless to say (though I am saying it needlessly nevertheless), I accepted the offer.  And then promptly agonized for two months about what to spend my loot on. In the end, my recent researches on and readings of girls' school stories and girls' fiction in general seems to have gotten the best of me, and I found myself plotting how many Girls Gone By books—which I had long coveted but never allowed myself to splurge on before—I could stretch the $105 to cover.

In the end, I concluded I could stretch it to cover six.  I knew one of them had to be Mabel Esther Allan's Margaret Finds a Future.  I've read a couple of Allan's other novels, and have, in fact, been meaning to write about her early work The Return to the West for a long time now.  And as I love atmospheric novels in which weather, especially winter weather, figures prominently, the setting of Margaret in a wintry Norfolk landscape proved irresistible. It's only since I received the book that I discovered that Lyn at I Prefer Reading had written about the book last year—happily, she liked it, so I still feel excited about my acquisition.

The next impossible-to-resist GGB proved to be Gwendoline Courtney's Sally's Family.  About a family of six orphaned children under the care of the 24-year-old oldest daughter, just after the end of World War II, attempting to make a home of a filthy, run-down house while facing rationing, poverty, and the fact that the children have developed widely-varied personalities from having wildly different experiences of the war.  It just screams potential in all sorts of ways, and I promptly gave in to temptation.

Next, a mini-splurge on school stories.  Well, I have been talking about them a lot lately, and apart from a couple of very enjoyable Elinor Brent-Dyers and a fun read of Antonia Forest's Autumn Term, I've had no experience with them at all.  So I figured these purchases could count as research. Right?  A blogger simply must do his research. That's my excuse and I will stick to it.  First, Elsie Oxenham, one of the biggest names in girls' school stories.  I know, I know, The Abbey Girls Go Back to School isn't the first Abbey Girls novel, but it is an early one, and I got a great deal on a used copy, so what can I say?  (And it looks like the copy was in good shape—was, that is, prior to being shipped from England in, basically, a plastic bag.  Suffice it to say it got just a bit mangled, as you can see a bit in the picture, but it is certainly still readable, so I won't complain too much.)

Next, several sources report that Evelyn Smith is considered one of the best of girls' school authors, though her career was tragically cut short by pneumonia.  So how could I resist another good deal on her Val Forrest in the Fifth?  

And then there was Josephine Elder's The Scholarship Girl at Cambridge, another series title (though a short series) that I'll be reading out of order.  No doubt it would be best to start with its precursors, Erica Wins Through and The Scholarship Girl, but ultimately I was just too tempted by a glimpse of what life at Cambridge was like for women in the 1920s.

And yes, I did say I had ordered six GGB titles, but alas a day or two later I got a notification that Elinor Brent-Dyer's The Maids of La Rochelle was out of stock and I had received a refund.  

Drat.  Next time for that one.  But it was okay, because there was one more, non-GGB title, that I had only barely managed to eliminate from the running for a cut of my tax refund shopping dollars. So, I used my refunded credit to nab a copy of Mary K. Harris' Gretel at St. Bride's, the wartime setting of which and the presence of a refugee girl from Nazi Germany had been luring me on since I first read about it.  Plus, honestly, as you all must know by now, I am always prone to be seduced by books that aren't readily available, and this one apparently hasn't been reprinted in ages, unlike my GGB acquisitions. Now I'll get to see if my attraction to it was justified.

And finally, we happened to be taking some book donations to the public library's donation center on Saturday, where we found a small book sale going on, and I picked up the above charming little Penguin paperback for only $1.  Could anyone possibly have resisted such a cover.  I would have paid a dollar for that alone, but I've actually already obtained some important information from it.  For years, I've read novels in which characters lived in bedsitters, and I don't think I ever knew exactly what it meant, so it was an eye-opener to learn from Katharine Whitehorn's introduction that it generally meant, effectively, renting a room.  Usually without a kitchen, and indeed even without access to a kitchen, and even without running water except in a bathroom down the hall.  Somehow, the term bedsitter always conjured up a kind of cozy if not very well-to-do homeyness in my mind, but I now realize that it very likely never conjured up anything of the kind for British readers—or British authors.  Probably more of a sort of depressing form of straitened circumstance instead. Odd how such a misconception should still have lingered even having read hundreds of British novels from the period, and dozens (at least) in which bedsitters figured in some way or another. Perhaps I should branch out in my reading more often, as cookbooks and guides to other homemaking topics could probably teach me as much about British life in my time period as novels can. At any rate, the learning experience was certainly worth a buck!

So there.  That was my warm-up.  Hopefully, my muscles and my credit card are stretched out and ready for tomorrow's exertions.  Wish me luck!