Lady of the Plantation by Josephine M Bettany

Thanks to Fashion History Timeline fitnyc.edu

Title: Lady of the Plantation 

Author: Josephine M Bettany 

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Chalet School in the Oberland by Elinor M Brent Dyer

The owners of the Chalet School, which began in the Austrian Tyrol and then moved to Guernsey, the Golden Valley of Armishire and finally Saint Briavel’s, an island off the Welsh coast, decide to open a finishing branch in the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland. The plan was to take girls from the Chalet School only, but parents with girls at other schools clamoured to send their daughters too.

Peggy Bettany, ex-head girl of the Chalet School, tells Elma, a girl from Dulverley High, that her Aunt Jo (well-known author Josephine M Bettany, also an ex-head girl of the Chalet School) has two new books coming out this Christmas. One will be a continuation of the Harbour School series, and the other, Lady of the Plantation, will be a novel about the American War of Independence. A sort of Gone With the Wind but set 90 years earlier, perhaps? Maybe. I can’t see Josephine M Bettany having anything of any weight to contribute to the issue of slavery. I wonder if Elinor Brent Dyer considered that?

Unfortunately I don’t think we know anything about the Harbour School. A harbour sounds like a promising setting for a school series: plenty of opportunities for accidents and disasters, on the quayside or in boats. But we have no idea which of Jo’s books belong to the series, and I don’t remember reading about it in any other Chalet School book. I really would like to know more about the Harbour School but I’m not sure that any books that we know of would really fit the bill. There is probably more information to be truffled out on fan fiction sites but I will leave you to look for yourselves if you want to.

Here’s my previous post about Josephine M Bettany’s books. You can see it does include Lady of the Plantation but I wrote that I had no recollection of it at all. That’s probably because I hardly ever read The Chalet School in the Oberland. It’s one of my least favourite in the Chalet School series.

Sadly my previous post about Josephine M Bettany’s books includes links to webpages that are no longer available.

Thanks to History.com The massively overlooked role of female slave owners