St Clare's

Fandom
Name:	St Clare's
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:	Enid Blyton
Date(s):	1941-1945
Medium:	Books
Country of Origin:	United Kingdom
External Links:
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St Clare's is a series of girls' boarding school novels by popular children's writer Enid Blyton. It follows the adventures of Patricia (aka "Pat") and Isabel O'Sullivan when they move to the boarding school, St Clare's. It shares several themes (and a number of character types and names are reused) in common with the later Blyton series Malory Towers.

Canon

The original canon series were 6 books, primarily focused on the twins and the rest of their form. While there is a core group of characters, students join and leave the form frequently with some only being present for a single book. This was a pattern that was frequently used in Blyton's other school series as well.

The twins appeared in all six original books and the Pamela Cox additions, as does Janet Robins, while other characters such as Hilary Wentworth, Alison O'Sullivan, Carlotta Brown, Mirabel Unwin, and Gladys Hilman appear in most of the original six books and in some of the continuations. Most of the teachers, particularly the head mistress, are also consistently present.

The books usually follow a pattern of one or more new students arriving in each book and it is around at least one of those characters that one of the main story-lines focuses. This may be causing problems, disrupting the form in some way, or not fitting in with them form or school. The form then resolve the issue through some means or another and there is typically some kind of message or lesson involved in doing so. A lot of these lessons are rooted in values of the time period the books were written so some are heavy handed or outdated by today's standards; as with most of Blyton's works, bigotry is present in a number of the story-lines or outcomes.

I like the aesthetics of Enid Blyton’s “St. Clare’s” books, but I have some problems...

What I like:

• Friendship

• Midnight Feasts!

• A super-chill dorm mother that’s tough on expectations but fair when needed

• The idea of having roommates

• Cool teachers

• Shenanigans

What I Dislike:

• Rampant Classism

• Fatphobia (Yeah, Alma Pudden was kinda bitchy, but she legit had an eating disorder and maybe you guys shouldn’t have called her “Pudding”!)

• Portraying girly-girls as either dumb, bitches, or dumb bitches.

• Protagonist-centered Morality. It makes people seem like hypocrites.

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Adaptations/Expansions

Pamela Cox wrote three books which slotted into gaps in canon within the original story-lines. Unlike Malory Towers, the St Clare's books did not have one book per term, instead having three of the original canon in first form, one in second form, one in fourth form, and the final book in the fifth form. Pamela Cox's additions slotted into the third and sixth form.

In Germany, the series (which was called Hanni & Nanni) had a much longer continuation from the six books, totaling 39 installments in all in the written series and 65 in the audio drama, with an additional four films produced based on the book series. They deviated from the original canon significantly, especially as the series went on.

There was also a Japanese anime series for the show, おちゃめなふたご ―クレア学院物語 (Mischievous Twins: the tales of St. Clare's), which ran for 26 episodes in 1991.

Fandom

While the books have been around since the 1940s, the St Clare's fandom online seems to have emerged around about 2002. The fandom is predominantly femslash, with a number of gen, friendship-focused stories. As the vast majority of the characters are female — both students and teachers — there is little to no het and slash in the fandom. There are some fanworks that involve crossovers with other Blyton series, such as Malory Towers, the Famous Five, and the Adventure series amongst others.

As with other Blyton books, St Clare's tended to have more of a presence on some smaller Livejournal communities and in various Livejournal-based challenges, as well as featuring occasionally in Yuletide. The fandom on Archive of Our Own is a microfandom with just 24 works as of November 2023, though works are still being posted in the 2020s. Like many older fandoms, a significant amount of fanworks were never cross-posted to AO3 or Fanfiction.net from spaces like Livejournal or Blyton focused forums.

Pairings

With the small fandom size, there is no single pairing that seems to overshadow the others, though Gladys Hilman/Mirabel Unwin could arguably be considered the most popular pairing in fanwork spaces. Alison O'Sullivan also appears in a number of different pairings due to her canonical tendency to be drawn to particular new students or teachers, which is often referenced as her "being silly over them" and her actions can be interpreted as a number of crushes, or what would have been called a "pash" at the time.

Notable Fanworks

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

Fanfic

• Admiration by Kanna Ophelia - "It's silliness." Mirabel glared at the envelopes. Some had been carefully cut into lacework, and through her uneasiness and disgust part of her marveled that anyone who admired her to spend so much time on this... nonsense... could fail to predict how she'd feel about fussy little hearts and lace. (Gladys/Mirabel)
• Errand Girl by Annabella Wrights - Almost no one remembers that Pam and Carlotta were once friends. (Gen)
• Hidden Letters by ParanoidKitten - (Alison/Angela, Alison/Sadie)
• Murder at the Malory Towers Reunion by cotterford1 - A crossover fic with Malory Towers and the Five Find-Outers.

External Links

• St Clare's tag at Archive of Our Own
• Enid Blyton section at Fanfiction.net (Individual series were not given their own section)
• St Clare's tag at Saffic