Raaisels Op Keurboslaan

The author wrote another very popular series based on a girls' boarding school set a couple of hours away from Cape Town, South Africa. She wrote these under her more usual name of Stella Blakemore. The first was published in 1932*, and as evidence of their enduring popularity, they are still being reprinted in the 21st C. They have been issued in the mid 2000's as a paperback with bright pink ornamental covers. Along with updates of currency, placenames etc, the full texts have once more been used, unlike the 1970's abridged reprinting. The boys' series, the Keurboslaan books, are being reprinted this year, 2009, as paperbacks, but in the 1970's abridged versions. The publishers possibly feel that much of the original text of these books had racist overtones, which would be unacceptable today. Where the Maasdorp school for girls stories are light-hearted, and appeal mainly to females, the Keurboslaan stories were read by female and male adults and children alike, and probably are still. They have a broader appeal, and in my opinion show the author's talents far better than the more genre-focussed girls' stories. I have other books by this author, and they confirm my belief that she had a great talent as a comic writer, who wrote about characters that one can identify with, admire and empathise with. It is a great pity that she, English-speaking herself, would not allow her books to be translated into English**: she wanted to boost the status of Afrikaans literature, and to offer the Afrikaans reading public the equivalent of the popular series for girls and boys found in the English genres of school stories, She certainly engendered a love of reading in more than one generation of Afrikaans readers; in my family, we are up to the third and possibly fourth generation! * An interesting observation is the change in the language - Afrikaans - between the 1930s text and the 1970s reprints. Afrikaans is a relatively new, very descriptive but also still growing language. ** Multilingual South Africans have the best of it; but English-only readers world-wide are missing a treat!

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Harry Righton

Harry Righton

About Harry Righton