Naught but ravening wolves: DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, The King's Curate (1930)

The best I could do for a cover pic

It is, perhaps, not easy to be haughty towards a man whom one has recently saved from a ravening mob.

This is perhaps a misleading opening for a review of a novel that hardly shows Dorita Fairlie Bruce in her most humorous form. But it’s peculiarly difficult to sum up The King’s Curate in any one quotation, and “ravening” is a darn good word (Bruce uses it at least one other time in the novel, from which scene I took this post’s title).

Dorita Fairlie Bruce is of course best known as one of the best-beloved authors of girls’ school stories, along with the likes of Elinor Brent-Dyer and Elsie Oxenham. The King’s Curate is the first of Bruce’s loose series of nine Colmskirk novels, only actually a series by virtue of being set in roughly the same area of Scotland over the course of several centuries. Later volumes occasionally echo earlier ones, and in those with contemporary settings (the five I discussed here back in 2015) there are a handful of cameo appearances by characters from one novel in another. All or most of the nine novels sort of straddle the line between adult fiction and girls’ stories, with some veering more toward one side and others veering the other.

The five “modern” Colmskirk novels are the most widely known today as a result of having been reprinted a few years ago by Girls Gone By. For whatever reason, GGB declined to reprint the four historical volumes from the series, and the first two, The King’s Curate (1930) and Mistress-Mariner (1932), have achieved an almost mythical status of being both unfindable and, for some readers anyway, unreadable. The first is certainly well-deserved, and I wouldn't be reading them myself if it weren't for my Fairy Godmother. They almost never come up for sale, and when they do it's for the price of a downpayment on a London flat. (Thank you FG as always!)

But is the latter judgment accurate? 

As I mentioned, the first four Colmskirk novels are all historical in subject matter, but these first two in particular are written in a self-consciously old-fashioned style. Though Curate was published in 1930, readers would do better to pretend they're reading a slightly less formal Sir Walter Scott or Emily Brontë, as that's the sort of style Bruce seems to have been aiming for. And probably more the former than the latter, as there is also a fair amount of Scots dialect.

But don’t change that dial just yet! Let me first note that, undoubtedly in common with at least some of you, I tend not to read historical fiction much, I tend to avoid dialect of any kind like the plague, and I tend to prefer literary stylistics that match the time in which they were written. Yet, despite those tendencies, I somehow fell immediately under the spell of The King's Curate and didn't want to stop reading. This is surely because, whatever her faults, Bruce is first and foremost a cracking good storyteller.

The King’s Curate is set in the years following the massive upheavals of the English Civil War (late mid-1600s, for those of you as vague on history as I was). A fascinating period, and one the ins-and-outs of which I readily confess I couldn’t possibly summarize. But one needn’t have studied one’s history books terribly well, as Bruce escorts you effortlessly into the thick of things. Patrick Mellish, who has been a Royalist soldier during the war, accepts a posting as curate in the parish of Kirkarlie in Ayrshire, a bittersweet return to the land of Braidheugh, the estate occupied by his family for hundreds of years but confiscated from him to be given to one of Oliver Cromwell’s cronies. The cronie is now deceased, but his daughter, the formidable Anne Carstairs, is carrying his torch as a passionate Covenanter and a force to be recognized in her primarily Covenanter community.

Mellish, who has come to terms with the loss of his family estate, accepts the commission reluctantly, reopening old wounds for the sake of his sister Alison, who has one of those literary illnesses where one wastes away living in a city but revives miraculously when removed to the countryside. (For what it’s worth, I feel as though I too might miraculously revive if removed to the Scottish countryside right about now…) And of course, Alison’s fragile, waifish vulnerability seems to prove irresistible to every male who comes into her proximity:

It seemed, in those days, as though a sudden sight of Alison Mellish bereft men of their breath for the moment, and set them to finding comparisons whereby they might explain her to themselves.

Not long after their arrival in Kirkarlie, Patrick rescues Anne when her horse bolts, and then in dutiful fair play she rescues him from angry villagers. In due course, we also meet Master Ebenezer Baldie, a Protestant minister living in a cave and preaching to his flock in a quarry under careful security as the tides of persecution shift, and, very much on the other side, Ned Crichton, an old soldier friend of Patrick’s who arrives in town as the leader of a band of "redcoats", sent to smoke out those pesky folk who insist on worshipping in ways not prescribed by the king.

Drama ensues, quite satisfyingly, and it’s quite difficult to stop turning pages, even for the sake of a good night’s sleep.

I started reading The King’s Curate rather ambivalently, for the reasons I mentioned above, but I really was seduced almost immediately by the characters, the interesting historical backdrop, and Bruce’s skillful plotting. I actually rather wish GGB had taken the plunge and published all nine of the Colmskirk novels, as I think quite a few readers would have been delightfully surprised. And for those of you who subscribe to The Scribbler (as surely most of you do), TKC was also reviewed, with similar enjoyment, by Elaine Pyrke in Scribbler No. 3.

One small quibble. "Daft Jock, the village idiot" is a rather unfortunately described (but thoroughly lovable) character. But though his nickname and some of the descriptions of him are grating to modern sensibilities, this is partly ameliorated by the fact that Bruce makes it clear that, though the locals can’t comprehend him, he's really far more an "Eccentric Jock" than a daft one. He happens to occasionally perceive the word of God bringing him instructions and inspiring him to action, which is unusual but certainly fortunate for the happy outcome of the tale. Plus, he's a musician, playing eloquently on his hand-made flute, and musicians are surely allowed a certain amount of eccentricity--had he come along in the Sixties, he might well have been a pop star.

Oh, and as for the dialect, the majority of it is from the lips of Jock himself (perhaps this is why the villagers think he’s daft? because they can’t understand what he’s saying?), and although it occasionally takes a wee bit of sounding out and some imagination, one really gets the hang of it fairly quickly.

I’ll also mention that Bruce’s work almost always contains a certain amount of Christian content, reflecting her own sincere and practical beliefs. On rare occasions in her books, this can become heavy-handed (as in Toby at Tibbs Cross, for example, at least for me). In The King’s Curate, however, in a time and place completely enmeshed in religious conflict, it’s quite fitting and historically interesting, and perhaps even rather relevant to today. Those in the U.S. at least might pause reflectively when one character exclaims:

“Naught but ravening wolves, and an unequal war, waged in the name of religion. Religion—pah! 'tis become but another word for politics!''

Just saying.

Now it’s on to Mistress-Mariner for me, which I can only hope is equally entertaining. And, indeed, I have books 3 and 4 of the Colmskirk series, A Laverock Lilting (1945) and The Bees on Drumwhinnie (1952), queued up on my TBR shelves for after that. I’ve always meant to get round to all of these (ever since I reviewed the latter five books in 2015, in fact), and it seems like the Late Pandemic Era is the time I’ve been waiting for!

Reading diary: DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, WINIFRED DARCH

DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, Nancy in the Sixth (1935)

The combined influence of my return to the Chalet School books (despite my glacial progression through the series) and my enjoyment of Dorita Fairlie Bruce's Colmskirk novels surely influenced my decision to grab an affordable copy of the out-of-print Girls Gone By edition of this earlier Bruce title when it popped up on Abe Books recently.

Although Bruce is one of the biggest names in the genre of girls' school stories, and although, as you all know, I've been having a lot of fun with that genre in the past year or so, I also had a bit of a resistance to Bruce's school stories. I've read that even some school story fans find Nancy a bit too much of a goody-two-shoes, and my only other experience with one of Bruce's series characters was Toby at Tibbs Cross, the wartime entry in her Toby series, which follows Toby into adulthood in the midst of the war (and is therefore likely to be rather different from the Toby school stories). I found that book just a bit too much on the Christian inspirational side for my own tastes. Perhaps the wartime setting and efforts to keep up the morale of her readers' had something to do with that as well.

But although I must admit there were times in reading Nancy in the Sixth that I could have dunked Nancy's head in a bucket of ice water for her ridiculous standards of behavior, including refusing to "sneak" (i.e. tell the truth about another student's bad behavior) even when it created chaos and inconvenience for the entire school she purports to care so much about, I still had a rollicking good time with the book overall. And it would take a gruffer reader than myself to not fall in love with the charming Bianca Jane (aka Bija), a junior whose efforts at training herself for a future as a biographer, not to mention her common sense and openness which highlight how silly Nancy's own standards are, play a pivotal role in the book's plot:

"And what's your name?"

"Bijah Allen."

"What?"

"I told you—Bijah Allen. I wasn't christened that, of course; I've got another, but Nancy Caird says it's not to be used, and if any one says it by mistake they're to be fined a halfpenny. I expect she meant me too—anyhow, I daren't risk it, because I'm rather hard-up at present, and a halfpenny's a halfpenny."

Clemency looked at her hard. "I wonder," she mused, "if you're a little mental—not quite right in your head, you know."

Bijah's keen sense of humour accepted this as an excellent joke.

"It's just my newness," she explained cheerfully. "I've never been to school before, and at first the Lower Third thought I must be a bit dotty too, but they soon saw that was a mistake."

As for the central conflict, the bitter conflict between Nancy and the Clemency, it's patently clear from page 1 that Nancy will come out on top, but that doesn't make the various twists and Clemency's deviousness any less enjoyable.

I have to confess that I've already placed an order for another of Girls Gone By's Nancy titles, and while I was at it came across an earlier Toby title as well and with an "in for a penny, in for a pound" kind of resignedness, ordered that one too. So it looks like I'll be learning more about Bruce's school stories in the near future.

WINIFRED DARCH, The New School and Hilary (1926) & Alison Temple—Prefect (1938)

I'm not sure that I really have the credentials to claim that a girls' school story author is criminally neglected. I've probably read a grand total of 25 or 30 school stories so far, out of many hundreds (or even thousands?) that true experts in the field would be familiar with. But I feel a bit inclined to make just such a claim of Winifred Darch.

I seem to get some support for such a claim from Sue Sims & Hilary Clare, who note in their Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories that:

Darch forges compelling and utterly credible plots with attractive characters; these, mixed with an English teacher's eye for precisely the right phrase, and a delightful sense of irony, make Darch's books among the best school stories ever written.

Despite this, however, only one of Darch's novels has been reprinted in recent decades, by (of course) Girls Gone By, and that edition—of The New School and Hilary—is now long out-of-print again, though fortunately not terribly difficult to track down. This lack of attention is hard to understand, though in a short intro to the GGB edition of Hilary Mary Cadogan suggests that her decision to write only stand-alone novels, instead of focusing on the same schools and characters for a series of novels, might be to blame. But it's certainly unfortunate, since The New School and Hilary, at least, is a very strikingly realistic portrayal of school life that almost warrants being included on my grownup school story list. Although it certainly was written for girls and not primarily for grownups, it nevertheless reminded me of Mary Bell's Summer's Day at times, which as you all must surely know by now is, for me, a sort of high-water mark in the genre.

In part, this is because the novel's focus shifts occasionally from the traditional perspective of a schoolgirl—in this case the titular Hilary, who at the novel's beginning makes the move from a posh boarding school to a local high school which has only just been opened—to the perspective of a young teacher, Judith Wingfield, who also attended Hilary's old school and is remembered by Hilary as a much-admired senior when she herself was only 12 years old. This lends the novel a very nearly adult perspective when it comes, for example, to the confrontation between Judith's idealism about negotiating class differences and the harsher realities of her new position:

The landlady no doubt meant to be very kind and Judith had come to Uffington with a firm resolve that she was going to help to break down the foolish barriers which still divided class from class. Still, mixing with all sorts of children and helping to raise their ideals was different from taking a bath in your landlady's kitchen!

Undoubtedly, as discussed in another introductory article, this one by Sue Sims, the vivid attention to detail of the scenes from Judith's perspective undoubtedly stems in part from the fact that Darch used her own teaching experiences as a model. Darch apparently continued to base many of the events of her stories on real events in her teaching career, and Sims quotes a former student of Darch who says, "We all enjoyed the stories and were great fans of the author. I remember well attempts to divert end-of-term English lessons from the set syllabus to a recounting of the plot of the story then in the press. We were usually successful!"

Illustration by Gilbert Dunlop,
from Alison Temple--Prefect

This basis in the realities of school life also makes The New School and Hilary quite interesting from a more historical or sociological perspective. Hilary's new high school brings together girls from very different classes and backgrounds, and the novel attempts to explore those differences a bit, with the result that the story feels grounded by comparison with the unquestioned affluence and zanily unrealistic perils and rescues of many school stories. Darch doesn't offer up any major life-threatening events here, and in fact might even in one scene be making a joke at the expense of such madcap stories:

"You don't mean you like her, Hilary?" demanded Marigold.

"No, I don't. But I've felt so horrid myself this week-end that I've got a sort of fellow feeling for her. I think if we go on being beastly to her she'll naturally be horrid, but if we don't—"

Marigold shrugged her pretty shoulders. "You'd better go and save her life or something, Hilary!"

But her story is no less entertaining for the absence of fires and floods and plagues of locusts (okay, I don't know of any school stories featuring plagues of locusts, but I wouldn't be that surprised if there were some).

I enjoyed The New School and Hilary so much that I promptly spent far too much money buying several more of Darch's novels. I've only read one so far, and that one, Alison Temple—Prefect (1938, reprinted in 1961 as Alison in a Fix), comes from considerably later in Darch's writing career. The GGB intro to New School suggests that Darch's later work suffered as a result of her decision to take early retirement from teaching in order to care for her sick parents. Because the great strength of her earlier works was the inspiration they took from Darch's actual experiences and those of her students, her 1935 retirement may have deprived her work of some of its former immediacy and attention to detail. In fact, Darch published only two more titles after Alison, despite living on into her mid-70s.

1961 reprint of Alison Temple--Prefect

Two books isn't enough to judge the career trajectory of an author who published nearly two dozen books in all. I can certainly say that Alison Temple—Prefect is neither as tightly plotted nor as realistic and well-developed from a character standpoint as New School, but I can also say that I had a great time reading it. The main plot here centers around the familiar theme of a much-loved headmistress going on leave and being replaced with a difficult new head who makes life a misery for the school. Darch offers the somewhat unusual twist of having the loved head be a fairly strict disciplinarian who is replaced by a expert on psychology who has newfangled ideas about not repressing girls with rules (but who instead tortures them by passive-aggressive measures far crueler than the rules they replace). The new headmistress, who happens to be Alison's Aunt Lucilla, also causes problems for Alison's sisters, including one who is in her first term as an art mistress at the school. And of course there's a subplot of a bitter rivalry between Alison and another girl, which is worked out tidily in the end.

Naturally, a healthy portion of the book's humor comes from Aunt Lucilla's theories of child psychology. She has considerably more theories than she has sense, as quickly becomes clear. There is humor in the girls' attempting to figure out her ideas:

'Isn't this awful, Clare? And exactly what is it all about? My sister Pamela was right; I ought to have read that book of Aunt—of Miss Bidgood's. I expect it's all in there.'

'W-What?' whispered Eve.

'All about not repressing children,' replied Alison briefly. 'That's chiefly what it comes to, doesn't it, Clare?'

'Yes,' said Clare. 'If children are repressed they either break out or they don't.'

'I should have thought that obvious,' murmured Alison.

'But if they don't they suffer from inferiority complexes, and it leads them to show off or else to—Oh, I can't remember—probably to die of broken hearts,' said Clare.

And then, a few pages later, Alison hilariously uses Aunt Lucilla's own theories against her:

'Would you mind reading a dozen lines from Paradise Lost or any other poem which has moved you deeply?'

Alison had turned very red.

'I couldn't possibly,' she said gruffly and finally.

Miss Bidgood looked disappointed.

'You should try to get over your shyness,' she said.

'Probably I was too much repressed when I was young.'

It's all great good fun, even if it's not up to New School's standards. And I still have two more Darch novels on my TBR shelves, so perhaps you'll hear more about those here in the future.

DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, The "modern" Colmskirk novels (1945-1955)

One of my favorite subgenres of middlebrow fiction is that dedicated to stories about young women finding careers. It's either a surprisingly small genre or I'm just missing out on a lot of the works that fit the genre, but it's always nice to come across one. [Hmmmm, one wonders if a list of such titles would be a possible goal?]

I wrote very briefly about Dorita Fairlie Bruce's The Serendipity Shop (1947) after I read it on our trip to Italy last year. It got me through my jetlag, for which I was very grateful, and I enjoyed it a lot and immediately bought two more of Bruce's Colmskirk novels for my TBR shelves.

The Colmskirk novels, for those who don't already know, and according to the Girls Gone By intros, were a series of nine novels Bruce wrote in the 1930s to 1950s, all set in or around the same Scottish village of Colmskirk. Four of the novels are truly historical in nature, set well before the 20th century, one more—Wild Goose Quest (1945)—is classed as historical by Girls Gone By because it seems to have been written and be set in the 1930s, and four were "modern" (i.e. set in the late 1940s and early 1950s when they were written). The novels all stand on their own and feature different main characters, though there are both some "guest appearances" by characters from one novel in others of the series and occasional loose connections between modern characters and those from the earlier historical volumes. It's a charming concept, and Colmskirk itself (apparently fictional though based on Largs in North Ayrshire) makes one yearn to visit and perhaps even take up residence. (Admittedly, though, I would take up residence just about anywhere in the U.K. at the drop of a hat—if only immigrating were easier…)

The first of my Colmskirk acquisitions after The Serendipity Shop was Wild Goose Quest, which I confess I was a bit luke-warm on. It had such a promising plot—a sort of treasure hunt involving, among other things, a girl who has lost her memory due to a completely far-fetched personal trauma—but just never really took flight for me (no pun intended, should you be familiar with the plot…). It's entertaining enough, however, and if you find yourself interested in the Colmskirk series, then you'll certainly want to check it out.

After that, I was my usual slow self about getting round to the other book I'd picked up, but when I finally did, any reservations that Wild Goose Quest had inspired were promptly dissipated. Triffeny (1950) is about a spoiled girl yearning for an artistic career in London, who finds herself instead discovering a possible future in the family's pottery studio. I've long known (and you've surely figured out by now) that I'm more likely to get excited about novels with women as main characters than I am about stories featuring men. Go figure. But that might have something to do both with my luke-warm response to Goose, which focused more on male characters, and on my eager enjoyment of Triffeny, which has not only a female lead but several important supporting actresses as well. Plus a "finding a career" plot.

The introduction to the Girls Gone By edition of Triffeny notes that the heroine "must be one of the most quickly reformed teenagers in fiction," and it's true that Bruce's portrayal of Triffeny's recovery from being spoiled is rather blithely unconcerned with realism. But then, I wasn't exactly seeking realism when I picked up the book, and you shouldn't be either, but it was a hugely enjoyable read from beginning to end.

After which, naturally, I had to pick up the remaining two modern Colmskirk novels, The Debatable Mound (1953) and The Bartle Bequest (1955). And The Debatable Mound instantly became my favorite of the series so far. (By the way, GGB hasn't reprinted any of the historical volumes from the series yet, though there was a hint that they might be thinking of it. Fingers crossed that they do.)

The Debatable Mound is all about the arrival of an eccentric archaeologist, his children, and their wonderful middle-aged cousin, Miss Pennycuick, to take possession of a house located next to a mysterious ancient mound. He has purchased the house with the specific intent of digging on the mound and determining its history and purpose, but it emerges that the owner of an adjacent house, the crotchety Admiral Majendie, believes that the mound is his property. The subsequent conflicts and the ways in which family members and other characters both complicate and help resolve the issue are the structure on which the plot rests.

But undoubtedly the principal pleasure of the novel for me is Miss Pennycuick herself, who, although she certainly helps to maintain and watch over the family in the absence of the children's dead mother, also has her fair share of spunk, independent thought, and a tell-it-like-it-is sensibility, setting her apart from the standard "maiden aunt/housekeeper" stock character she at first seems to represent. Her personality and spirit inform the entire plot, even if she is not a constant presence. Here, for example, is Miss Pennycuick telling one of the girls about the car she purchased for herself for the move, and her experiences in learning to drive it:

'I believe,' replied Miss Pennycuick, with modest pride, 'I must have a natural flair for driving; it was no trouble to learn—no trouble at all. Only once did I make a really serious mistake, and that was a week ago, when I put my foot on the exhilarator going into the garage, just as my instructor was opening the door.'

'And was he very much exhilarated?' asked Lalage wickedly.

Miss Pennycuick eyed her with severity.

'Nobody was hurt,' she answered coldly, 'and the door was only slightly damaged.

And here, in a scene at the mound excavation site, is her no-nonsense reaction to the unpleasant use to which the site may have been put:

"I have found undeniable traces of their activities to-day. That stone on which you are sitting, Miss Pennycuick, has undoubtedly flowed over with the blood from human sacrifices.'

Cousin Pen settled herself more comfortably on her seat.

'Very disagreeable, indeed,' she assented, 'but it happened a very long time ago and has been well washed by the rains of several thousand years, so I'll just stay where I am.'

Added to such exchanges, her ongoing conflict with the Admiral about his complete inability to recall her name— and his substitution of such alternates as "Pennyfeather" or "Pennyfarthing"—adds humor to each development of the plot. In fact, of the Dorita Fairlie Bruce novels I've read so far, The Debatable Mound is undoubtedly the funniest and the one most obviously infused with high spirits and energy.

Although Bruce is clearly most famous for her school stories, and although even the Colmskirk novels were likely aimed at (or at least marketed to) a readership of teenagers or young adults, in the case of The Debatable Mound I feel like any fan of humorous village stories would get quite a lot of enjoyment from it. This might also be true of The Serendipity Shop and maybe even Triffeny, but The Debatable Mound in particular reminded me just a bit of Miss Buncle's Book or The Stone of Chastity and other village tales that are among my favorites.

All the more disappointing, then, to proceed eagerly to the final modern Colmskirk novel, The Bartle Bequest. Although this novel again features young working women as central characters, as well as some prominent cameos by characters from the earlier novels, and although it certainly has an entertaining enough plot—involving the establishment of a local museum, the young woman who becomes its first curator, the 16-year-old orphan girl she adopts as her companion and household help, and the sleazy young man who nefariously profits from the new curator's misguided trust—I also found it irritating in a couple of ways.

After I mentioned The Serendipity Shop last year, a reader emailed me and mentioned that she had enjoyed the whole series except for the sexism of The Bartle Bequest, and I think I know what she meant. Without giving too much away, let's just say that these novels, which are otherwise so intriguingly concerned with young women finding career fulfillment, mostly end with them giving up those careers in favor of being wives and mothers. Now, I can take that with a grain of salt, since that was indeed the way things often unfolded for many women in the middle decades of the 20th century, and it may even have been an improvement on their grandmothers' lives, where even a year or two of career fulfillment might have been impossible. But somehow, in The Bartle Bequest, it all just seems a bit more condescending and insulting than in other books in the series.

What's more, there's the case of Miss Pennycuick, whose praises I've already sung above and who appears in a supporting role here. When she first appeared in The Bartle Bequest, I was delighted to encounter her again, but that delight dissipated quickly. By the time this novel begins, Miss Pennycuick is a married woman herself, but more importantly, she seems to have had some sort of psychotic break. We learn, for example, that she has developed a sort of superstitious phobia of Egyptian artifacts such as some of the ones in Professor Crawford's home. What? The woman who shrugs off sitting on a stone where human sacrifices have been performed is now so frightened of the headdress of a young Egyptian woman that she can't bear to have it in the house? This seems quite ridiculous, and one wonders if all the overlapping characters didn't just finally get the best of Bruce, so that she forgot how vividly independent and no-nonsense Miss Pennycuick had been in the earlier novel. Regardless, the affection I felt for Miss Pennycuick in TBM was nowhere to be found while reading TBB. And Professor Crawford himself—a kindly, absent-minded father and scholar in the earlier novel—here appears only once, flying into such a rage that the museum curator tries to lure him into the office so she can lock him in and call the police.

Despite my obvious annoyance at these (mis-)characterizations, I do hasten to mention that these two characters appear only briefly in The Bartle Bequest, so for many readers they may not weaken one's reading experience very much. (And of course if you haven't read The Debatable Mound, then you won't mind them at all.) The novel is quite entertaining otherwise, and certainly worth reading if you've enjoyed the other Colmskirk novels. But while I can imagine re-reading The Serendipity Shop and The Debatable Mound, and quite possibly Triffeny as well, I believe I've finished with The Bartle Bequest for good.

I should note, for fans of Bruce's school stories, that the young curator of the museum in this novel is none other that Primula Mary Beaton, who apparently appears briefly in Bruce's Springdale series. At one point, too, Primula mentions her wartime service as a Wren, during which she became friends with Dimsie, the main character of that series. Among the other guest appearances here are Julia Lendrum, who was introduced in The Serendipity Shop and who seems to be quite a mover and shaker in Colmskirk, as she figures prominently in all the subsequent books. Julia's sister Merran, along with her Serendipity Shop, appear briefly, as does Susan from The Debatable Mound, and Triffeny is mentioned but does not appear in person.

On the whole, I'm very happy to have been introduced to the modern Colmskirk novels, even if I have a few reservations about them. Now, of course, I'm curious about the four historical novels from the series—The King's Curate (1930), Mistress Mariner (1932), A Laverock Lilting (1945), and The Bees on Drumwhinnie (1952). As luck would have it, a random Abe Books search has resulted in an affordable copy of A Laverock Lilting setting forth on its merry way toward my overcrowded shelves even as I write this. The other volumes are either virtually nonexistent (the first two) or prohibitively expensive (the last), so here's hoping that Girls Gone By will come through with new editions of all of them.