My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had driven for several hours to visit a town in which I used to live. It was there that, with a few minutes to spare, I popped into the second hand bookshop and came out with a crate full of Elsie Oxenham’s. Many of them were titles I’d never seen elsewhere and reader, if collecting antique books has taught me anything, it is to pick up the titles (if you can) that you’ve never seen before. The Girl Who Wouldn’t Make Friends was one of the bigger books in the crate; it’s a hefty thing from 1909, an early doors Oxenham in which she flirts with a Blyton-esque adventure story set in Wales (an unusual thing for me from this author so wed to her Abbey) and a rather eccentric plot which involves cars being driven at people and pointed stakes being jabbed into burglars.

Okay. Let me elaborate. The plot sees Robin Brent be told that she has inherited a palatial estate in Wales. Partially because the bequeather (is that the word? It is not the word. I am going to make it be the word) fancied her mum. Forgive the bluntness, there’s no other way to express it. (Racy Oxenham. It’s quite the thing!). Robin’s mum gets married to somebody else, the first chap mourns at a distance, becomes a painter, paints lots of desperately yearning stuff, dies, gives his estate to the daughter of his first love, and his actual own adopted child isn’t particularly happy about any of this when Robin and her family move in. YOU THINK? Gosh, I love this period in children’s literature where the kids all have legitimate gripes and the adults just go ‘my dude, get a grip’ and move on.

So the adopted child, Gwyneth, decides everyone’s horrendous (quite right Gwyneth, you fight the good fight) and shenanigans shenanig until the inevitable happens and everyone makes friends. Naturally we have a few life or death moments and Oxenham does something genuinely good with them. There’s something rather fun in seeing her go for them in a way that, for me, I don’t think she quite does later on in her work. It’s a young author trying to find her style and it’s fun. I mean, there’s even a moment where Gwyneth who is an excellent car driver for plot reasons tries to run the other children and their friends off the road. Repeatedly! It did make me do quite the double take when I first read it but then I reminded myself of the speed and size of cars in 1909. And I got over it. A little bit. Not really.

This is an interesting piece which gives the sense of an author trying out a new style and seeing if it fits. It’s very interesting when sat against the dynamics of her later books which, for me, always seem to hinge on interpersonal relationships rather than actual, let’s say it, just spit it out, ‘plot’. Of course the interpersonal matters here but I think this is a book in which plot and action takes a lead and we see an author kind of exploring what she can actually do with the page. Experimental EJO! Quite the thing!

One final thing to mention is that there are elements in here which have aged poorly when read with a contemporary eye. Along with ethnic and racial stereotypes, one of the characters has “playful” interactions with animals which border on the cruel and occasionally step firmly across that border.

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