School House in the Wind
A Trilogy by Anne Treneer
By (author) Anne Treneer Introduction by Brenda Hull, Patricia Moyer
Publication date:
01 May 1998Publisher
University of Exeter PressDimensions:
202x134mm5x8"
ISBN-13: 9780859895118
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 by Patricia Moyer, the book includes a short biography of Anne Treneer by Brenda Hull, continuing the story to her death in 1966, and a descriptive bibliography of her writings.
The books are full of delights - evocations of the landscape in Cornwall, of the Malvern Hills and the Bredon County. And her insights into the educational system in which she taught, with occasional therapeutic breaks, for forty or so years are fascinating. How she would have hated the Gradgrind and Bounderby ethos of current education. The books create a picture of a character talented, loveable and essentially wise.