Denise of the Fourth by Muriel Bernadine Browne

Title: Denise of the Fourth

Author: Muriel Bernadine Browne

Publisher: not known 

Source book: The School at the Chalet by Elinor M Brent Dyer (Chalet School #1)

Gisela Marani, the first Head Girl of the Chalet School, is given a copy of Denise of the Fourth by her father. When I first read The School at the Chalet I absolutely believed that Denise was a real, if very toshy, school story. However, much more recently, several internet searches have offered me websites about missing persons, obituaries, or…the Chalet School. 

And of course it never occurred to me as a child that it might be a little unlikely a small town like Innsbrück would have bookshops selling children’s books in English in the 1920s. Especially a book by an unknown author. I can tell you that small towns in Switzerland these days still don’t sell children’s books in English, although there are piles of Harry Potters (very popular) translated into French, and 20 miles down the road, translated into German. But never mind that. What do we think of Muriel Bernadine Browne’s book? Joey Bettany thinks it’s a shriek!

It’s obvious that Denise of the Fourth is pretty dreadful example of your typical early 20th century schoolgirl fiction. 

I hope you can read this screen grab without squinting. I’m sorry but I would have gone quite mad typing all that. Well done EBD for creating this fictional book. And it is rather nice that the fictional Chalet School gets the idea of a school magazine (The Châletian: the first issue appears in CS #2) and a holiday to celebrate the head mistress’s birthday, from another fictional book.

NB I have always wondered how one is supposed to pronounce Chaletian. As a child I said “shalety-un”, if you see what I mean. My mother, on the other hand, who read the early Chalet School books in the 1930s, always said “shalee-shn”. What do you think?

Both photographs of Lac Leman taken by me