School House in the Wind

Anne Treneer

Description

Long out of print and now published together for the first time, these three volumes of autobiography of the Cornish author and schoolteacher Anne Treneer cover the period from her birth at Gorran in 1891 to her retirement from teaching in 1948.

The first volume, School House in the Wind, covers her early childhood in Cornwall until 1906. Cornish Years takes her to Truro, Exmouth and Exeter, and from there to Camborne, Liverpool and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. A Stranger in the Midlands covers the years between 1931 and 1947, when she taught at King Edwards High School for Girls in Birmingham. As well as a substantial introduction, the book includes a short biography of Anne Treneer, continuing her story to her death in 1966, and a descriptive bibliography of her writings.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Midlands (Inglaterra)
• Idioma inglés
• Cornualles
• History of the British Isles
• General officer
• English
• General
• Midlands
• Autobiography
• History
• Cornwall
• Exeter
• Birmingham
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780859899437
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

SCHOOL HOUSE IN THE WIND
A TRILOGY BY ANNE TRENEER
From School House in the Wind
Mevagissey town seemed almost to hang. Its houses
were ingeniously cornered together so that as many as
possible were over the sea. Up the containing sides of
the narrow valley they mounted skyward or stood up
from rocks by the quay-side. There were strange steep
alleys, courts and crooked ways which would have been
wonderful for hide and seek.
Schools not too big with good masters and mistresses
free to help the individual children, and not cluttered
up with secretarial work, should be the English pattern.
Not schools all alike but rich and varied; our education
had better remain too haphazard than too straightly
planned . . . schoolmasters today need to emancipate
themselves from the encroachment of directors, and
from the army of planners, organizers and testers.
From Cornish Y ears
The estuary of the Exe had for me no adventitious
glory of association. I loved it purely for itself. It was as
changeable as I. Sky and tide; wind, rain and sun; the
season and time of day or night transfigured it.No one ever is good enough to teach—and everyone is
too good to teach all the time.
Camborne is an ugly town, yet I felt I would not
exchange the treeless mining country in which it is
set—a country so worked for tin that a house in a
Redruth street might subside into an adit—I would not
exchange its bareness and the stubborn, ghostly
enginehouses through which the sky showed, for the green
abundance of Devon.
From A Stranger in the Midlands
But do I dream, or is it not true, that on the motor road
between Birmingham and Wolverhampton I used to
come upon, somewhere, a view of almost apocalyptic
magnificence.
Exeter is my true, my most beloved College, Liverpool
University was a good foster mother to me; and Oxford
set me free.
I love England, and I adore Cornwall; but I dearly like
to be heading away from both for a change; I like
schools well enough and I am interested in education,
but how dearly I like, how very dearly I have always
liked, to shake the chalk from off my fingers, and kick
the blackboard into the sea.MARY REEVES, University of Plymouth
“. . . Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, Richard
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Robert Roberts’ The
Classic Slum and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings. Anne Treneer’s trilogy is of a quality
to stand comparison with any or all of the texts listed
above . . . Any reader drawn into the world of School
House in the Wind will want to travel further in Anne
Treneer’s peculiarly bracing company.”
MARION GLASSCOE, University of Exeter
“Anne Treneer’s experience of freedom as a child
running in the wind becomes the catalyst for her
realisation of the vivid quality of a life lived fully from
moment to moment and free from the destructive
effects of improper material concerns. Less clumsily
she expresses it: ‘children should be taught that only if
they have nothing in their hands can they enjoy the
wind and know life from death’. Such perception
moulds her life and underlies her account of it in all
three volumes.
Her books have a highly individual quality,
unpretentious, honest, and shot through with comment so
succinct and judicious as to be epigrammatic. Her
connection with Exeter makes it specially appropriate
that the Press should reissue her work.”
JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH,
University of London, Birkbeck College
“In the autobiographies she not only captures the beauty
of the landscapes of Britain with extraordinary skill, but
also conveys a sense of their significance for her class
and generation.Treneer is a writer who deserves a great
deal more critical attention than she has gained . . . I
found the autobiographies particularly refreshing,
because they didn’t focus on women’s oppression, but
rather on the way in which women forged possibilities
for themselves, in the context of their society.”DOLLY MCPHERSON, Wake Forest University
“. . . one of the most moving autobiographies I have
read in recent years. I feel that I must pass it on and
urge fellow scholars in autobiography to teach it in their
courses and to make the work of this skilled, sensitive
writer more accessible . . . Its power comes from its
directness, its real life immediacy, and its evocation of a
woman in history.”
Cover illustrations
The front cover shows Anne Treneer in the 1920s
wearing her University of London academic gown.The
photograph was kindly supplied by Arthur Gibson.
The photograph on the back cover was taken in the late
1940s, and shows Anne Treneer on the cliffs near Porth
Island, Newquay: one of her favourite walks. Her
goddaughter, Jennifer Harvey, says that this picture is as
typical of Anne Treneer as any she has seen.SCHOOL HOUSE
IN THE WIND
A TRILOGY BY ANNE TRENEERvi ~ School House in the Wind: A Trilogy
First published in 1998 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive,
Exeter, Devon EX4 4QR
UK
The text of
School House in the Wind, Cornish Years, A Stranger in the Midlands
© The Estate of Anne Treneer
Introduction, Biographical and Bibliographical Notes
© 1998 University of Exeter Press
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 0 85989 511 4
Paperback ISBN 0 85989 512 2
Typeset by Exe Valley Dataset Ltd, Exeter, Devon
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Short Run Press Ltd, ExeterIntroduction ~ vii
CONTENTS
Introduction
by Patricia Moyer ix
School House in the Wind 1
Cornish Y ears 153
A Stranger in the Midlands 391
Anne Treneer: A Biographical Sketch
by Brenda Hull 611
A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of
Anne Treneer 615viii ~ School House in the Wind: A Trilogy
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Brenda Hull and Patricia Moyer would like to express their
gratitude for the continuous and lively support of the late
F.L. Harris, the distinguished Cornish educator and historian,
who was for many years the Director of the University of
Exeter Extra-Mural Studies programme in Cornwall and who
is mentioned by Anne Treneer in the trilogy.
We also wish to thank the Revd Cyril Treneer, priest and
poet, Anne Treneer’s nephew, for his generous and creative
encouragement.
We thank all of the members of the University of Exeter
Press, the intelligent and supportive readers who
recommended the reprint, and most particularly Simon Baker and
Genevieve Davey for their subtle, patient, consistent and
imaginative editing and supervision.Introduction ~ IX
INTRODUCTION
by Patricia Moyer
This first complete one-volume edition of the three books of
Anne Treneer’s autobiographical writings gives readers
something rather special. At various times it has been possible to get
a copy of the first part, School House in the Wind, but Cornish
Years and A Stranger in the Midlands have been out of print for
many years, and difficult to locate except in library reserved
collections.
Many readers will be new to the writings of Anne Treneer,
attracted by the Cornish, Devon and Midland settings of the
texts. Others will be interested in the autobiographical form
and its particular relevance for women writers. Some will be
more concerned with Treneer’s fascinating history of education
from primary schools to training colleges, the universities of
Exeter, Liverpool and Oxford, grammar schools in Cornwall
and Birmingham, and timely references to adult education.
Anyone interested in poetry as writer and reader will find a
rich source of pleasure in these texts. But whatever your
interest, you are privileged to be able to read the works in a
unified format.
This edition of the three volumes contains a short
biographical sketch as well as a full bibliography, both prepared by
Brenda Hull. The bibliography will give you a clear indication
of how much other material in other forms and genres was
produced by Anne Treneer. You will have the pleasures of
searching out these other writings and beginning to learn more
ixx~ School House in the Wind: A Trilogy
about Anne Treneer’s work. Readers may browse, researchers
may explore, and eventually Treneer will receive the
recognition her work demands.
***
With extraordinary assurance and continuity, Anne Treneer’s
autobiographical narrative moves throughout the three texts
from her beginnings as a student in her father’s two schools; to
her acceptance in the Pupil Teachers’ Centre at St Austell in
1906 (which became St Austell County School, attended a few
years later by A.L. Rowse); to her training at the Diocesan
Training college in Truro, including her period as an
unqualified teaching assistant in small village schools in
Treverbyn in Cornwall and in Exmouth in Devon; to her
academic studies at Exeter University College, her external
London degrees and her Camborne grammar school position;
to a research fellowship at Liverpool University, her return to
teaching, then to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from 1929 to
1931, for research and a further degree; and to her prestigious
and accomplished career as a teacher at King Edward’s School
in Birmingham.
This is a remarkable educational and social history of the
period 1891 to 1947. It is an astonishing achievement for a
young woman from a modest if cultured background, quite
comparable to the heady achievements recorded by A.L.
Rowse in his autobiography A Cornish Childhood (published in
1942, two years before the first of Treneer’s trilogy appeared in
1944). We do not know how much Treneer was inspired to
write her own version of a Cornish childhood after reading
Rowse’s, but it is reasonable to speculate that she was
stimulated by his work as well as by the general wartime
awareness of the transience of cultures. She refers to Rowse’s
book in a footnote in Cornish Y ears when she is describing the
new St Austell County School building:
The school at a later stage is memorably described in Mr A.L.
Rowse’s book A Cornish Childhood; but by then, under anIntroduction ~xi
authoritarian head master, all was changed. Mr Raynor had
1tried to run a fr