Early life
Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley was born on November 25, 1880 in Southport, Lancashire, England to an English father and a Scottish mother.
Before Elsie was 2 years old the family moved to Ealing, West London, where they lived for nearly forty years. She and her sisters went to private schools and attended Ealing Congregational Church. The six Dunkerley children in order of age were: Elsie, Marjory (Maida), Roderic, Theodora (Theo), Erica and Hugo.
The Dunkerleys lived in five different houses during their time in Ealing and moved to Worthing, Sussex, in 1922.
Elsie took the surname Oxenham as her pen name when Goblin Island was published in 1907. Her father, William Arthur Dunkerley, had used the pen-name “John Oxenham” for many years prior to this.
Later life and death
During the London years, Elsie became involved in the British Camp Fire Girls movement and qualified as a Guardian – the leader of a group of Camp Fire Girls. She ran this Camp Fire Group for some 6 years, until the move to Sussex. One of the Camp Fire members was Margaret Bayne Todd – later Margaret, Lady Simey – who appears in Abbey Girls in Town and to whom that title was dedicated. It is thought that she was the ‘original‘ on whom the characters of both Jenny-Wren and Littlejan were based.
At some point during her time in London Elsie joined the English Folk Dance Society. She then discovered how ‘badly‘ she had been doing the dances, as related in The Abbey Girls Go Back to School (published 1922). Everything that the ‘Writing Person’ [her on-page persona] told Maidlin, Jen and Joy, in The New Abbey Girls (published 1923), about dancing, Grey Edward, and the Camp Fire had happened as described.
After the family had moved to Worthing, Elsie taught folk dancing in nearby villages and schools. She tried to start another Camp Fire but that was not a success as most of the girls of the right age were already Girl Guides.
At first, the family all lived at Farncombe Road, Worthing. After their mother died, the four sisters moved out, living in pairs, Elsie with Maida and Erica with Theo. None of the Dunkerley sisters married, but both their brothers did.
Elsie died in a local nursing home on January 9, 1960, a few days after Erica.
Books
Elsie is best known for her Abbey Series of 38 titles which chart the lives of the main characters from their mid-teens until their daughters reach a similar age.
The Hamlet Club, formed in the first book in the series Girls of the Hamlet Club, was set up to combat snobbery in the school. Underlying the club’s overt activities of folk-dancing and rambles was its motto ‘To be or not to be’ and its badge, the Whiteleaf Cross.
These were both symbols of deeper meanings. The motto, deliberately using a quote from the Shakespeare play Hamlet, is taken to mean to make the right choice, usually duty above self-interest, when it arises. Throughout the Abbey Series the various main characters come up against this choice and its consequences and are shown growing and maturing through making difficult decisions. The badge, taken from a landmark local to the area in which the series is set, is also symbolic—as is any cross—of sacrifice.
The Abbey of the series is almost a character in itself. Based on Cleeve Abbey in Somerset, it first appears as a romantic ruin in the second of the series The Abbey Girls. By the end of this book, the cousins Joan and Joy Shirley are living in Abinger Hall, in the gardens of which the Abbey is situated. Joy has been discovered to be the granddaughter of the late owner, Sir Antony Abinger and Abinger Hall is left to her, but Joan, who was not related to Sir Antony, has been left the Abbey “Because of [her] love for it, and because [her] knowledge of it was so thorough.”
The Abbey and its influence pervades the whole series. Characters try to live up to the precepts of the early Cistercian monks who lived there and even when facing difficult situations abroad, find that the Abbey ethos helps them find the way through to the right decision.
Elsie depicted herself directly and indirectly in several places within the Abbey series. As “The Writing Person” she is depicting herself as she was in the early 1920s, over 40 years of age and going to the folk dance classes run by the English Folk Dance Society in London. Once Mary-Dorothy Devine, first introduced in The Abbey Girls Again, becomes a writer, statements she makes about the writing experience must logically be those of Elsie herself. She talks of “finding” the books and of “listening in to [her own] private wireless”. Some fifteen years later according to the internal chronology of the series, and nearly thirty years later in real time, Mary-Dorothy advises Rachel Ellerton, a younger writer who has been trying to get her adult fiction published, to try writing for children:
…my books are for girls, not for grown-ups, but I’ve felt it worth while to write them … I’ve never dared to think I could help grown-ups; I doubt if I could even amuse or interest them. But it has seemed worth while to try to influence girls and children for good, by amusing them and catching their interest. Girls are the grown-ups of the future. They may keep something of what is put into them while they are fresh and receptive. I’ve believed it was more worth while to write for them than to try to write novels.
This statement, from near the end of Elsie‘s writing career, seems to convey her own writing credo. It is quoted in its entirety as one of the few insights Elsie gives into her own reasons for writing. In her very first book, Goblin Island, published nearly fifty years earlier and written in the first person, Jean, the narrator, says:
Being an author’s daughter, of course I tried to write stories too. I knew all about father’s books and helped with many of them, and I always longed to write a book of my own. When I met the Colquhouns I was writing a novel, but it was a secret even from father, for I was very shy about it. But before long my interest in the children … grew so strong that I left the novel alone. I watched the story of Peggy Colquhoun and Somebody Else to the very end, and it seemed to me that instead of trying to write a novel I might make a story out of the things I had seen really happening.
