Allison Thompson Writer

Writing on English folk dance, Elsie J. Oxenham, Jane Austen, May Day and maypole dancing, Elsie J. Oxenham and more!

Elsie J. Oxenham and Margery Meets the Roses

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Published in 1947, Margery Meets the Roses is a “Connector” book, part of the Rachel-and-Damaris/Rainbows group of eight novels, one of which is directly in the Abbey Girls series: A23 Maidlin to the Rescue (1934). Margery Paine, the principal heroine of this book that bears her name, is not an Abbey Girl, but her story introduces four sisters, one of whom goes on to become a May Queen. I enjoyed this book with its two romances when I first encountered it, not too long ago, but subsequent readings have left me a little uncomfortable or dissatisfied with it. It is, however, another important book for folk-dance readers.

(For those just joining the party, this blog’s current topics are an examination of Elsie J. Oxenham’s Abbey Girl novels plus Connectors from the point of view of a folk dancer. I have found EJO to be a reliable and informative narrator of the early days of the folk-dance revival in England, and want to explore what she has to tell us about that time. Posts generally have an initial discussion, a plot synopsis and then a dance-oriented discussion.)

For dancers, a central motif of this book is the perpetual and unresolved tension between [Read more…]

A30_Two Joans at the Abbey

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Published in 1945 but set in July through August of 1932, A30_Two Joans at the Abbey takes us into the Second Generation titles. While it is not one of my favorite titles, it is satisfactorily constructed with a nice balance of adventure and folk dancing.

There is an enormous difference in the experience of reading the Abbey Girls series in Publication Order, which is how Stella Waring and Sheila Ray organized their Island to Abbey analysis, in Reading Order, which is how this series of posts is organized, or in Random Order, which is how I (along with, I suspect, many other readers) first encountered Oxenham’s works. We don’t really need to discuss Random Order, which was confusing and sometimes frustrating, but also fun to try to puzzle out the characters and relationships. This puzzlement was not aided by Elsie’s fondness for repeating certain names: take Cecily/Cicely/Cecilia, Rosamund/Rosalind, Marjorie/Maidlin/Maribel, Joan/Janice/Jehane/Littlejan/Joan-Two/Jansy/Jean/Jen, for instance. Who are all these people?

In Reading Order, we dealt with the seven titles that form the Retrospective Titles, A4 through A10, long, long ago—way back in July of 2020. These titles focus on the exploits of young Jen Robins and her pal Jacky and the still teenaged Joan and Joy Shirley as they uncover the many secrets of the Abbey: Lady Jehane’s jewels, the Monk’s Path, and other treasures hidden by Ambrose, the lay brother who loved Jehane and who became a saintly emblem—a Guardian as it were, and I don’t use that word carelessly—of both the secrets of the Abbey and its spiritual heritage. You’ve forgotten about them, right? I know I have. [Read more…]

A05_Secrets of the Abbey

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Published in 1939, A05_Secrets of the Abbey takes place in May and June of l917, Abbey time. Joan and Joy Shirley are eighteen—they apparently have left Miss Macey’s school, although this is not explicitly stated. The story has two main components—discovering what happened to lay-brother Ambrose and his love Lady Jehane after the dissolution of the Abbey, and Jen Robin’s hard but valiant choice [Read more…]