[In the following review of A Goodly Fellowship, the reviewer writes approvingly of Chase's descriptions of her teaching experiences.]

These autobiographical chapters by the author of Mary Peters and Dawn in Lyonesse might have borne the subtitle “The Education of an American Teacher,” for such a phrase would have suggested the receptivity of the writer's attitude and both the breadth and the boundaries of her book's material. But it would have offered no hint of the lively observation that accompanies Miss Chase's experience, nor of the salty tang of her wit. Writing with the modesty of one who is always learning, yet with convictions by no means lukewarm, recalling her response to American life in greatly differing aspects from Maine to Montana, emphasizing always the teacher rather than the novelist in her own work, Mary Ellen Chase has produced a book [A Goodly Fellowship] of delightful remembrance and commentary. Although this volume is in a sense a sequel to A Goodly Heritage, it can be fully enjoyed by itself. And although it contains much thoughtful consideration of the practice and theory of teaching and the prerequisites of success in teaching, it is bright with shrewd, sharp laughter and alive with a number of interesting characters. Miss Chase recounts her experience as a teacher; but it is always the novelist who writes.

The first two chapters of personal recollection are as interesting as a New England story: the mother who recited poetry as she rolled out ginger snaps and who infused the vigor of the English language into the dullest spelling lesson; the stern father who loved Greek verse and the natural scene about him; the old women of the village who could not be bound by narrow New England horizons because they had gone with their husbands to sea; and then the rough-and-ready district school where 19-year-old Mary Ellen Chase taught forty-nine children of every school age. From this environment, then, she stepped adventurously and abruptly upon her graduation from the University of Maine: she went job-hunting in Chicago.

Her travels, heretofore, had been limited to one trip to Boston and a chaperoned attendance at a Y.W.C.A. conference on Lake George. She was “younger in every respect,” she says, than young teachers today can ever be: “indeed, no one in this year of grace could be in such a state of blissful innocence of the world and its ways as was I.” And it need scarcely be said that her first wide-eyed experiences with “the world” make piquant reading. But the Hillside School, where she got her first position, was a journey's end well worth seeking and even suffering for.

This was the farm-home-school (all three) established by the Lloyd-Jones sisters in the Wisconsin valley where the Lloyd-Jones family had settled when they came from Wales to America. It would no doubt be called “progressive” today, but its heads used no term so pretentious; “their school had quite naturally grown out of themselves”; it was “a way of life, sound, reasonable, cooperative and enchanting”; and it was, Miss Chase sums up as she describes the life there, “the best school for children of all sorts and conditions that I have ever known.” In her book it shares honors for interest with the Catholic College of St. Catherine, where Miss Chase enjoyed the intellectual responsiveness, the energy and laughter, as well as the high purpose, among the nuns who were her fellow-teachers and friends.

The next work after Hillside, however, offers the author opportunity for portraiture which is wittily entertaining as well as acute. This was a fashionable school for girls in Chicago, with duty as its watchword and imagination conspicuously absent from its equipment: “Mrs. Moffat never turned her broad back upon any demands of Providence even though she herself invented them.” In retrospect it is extremely amusing. And then comes study in Germany, with contrasting pictures which are still very much alive in the American visitor's mind and—that raging Berlin teacher, that charming students' home in the Harz Mountains!—very interesting.

Montana was the goal of a journey in search of health. It was here, in long hours of reading, that Mary Ellen Chase really discovered the richness and the reward of English literature and determined that this should be her teaching specialty. It was here, too, that she began to write. And in a brief teaching experience here her own education as a teacher proceeded further, with lively young pupils of a type she had never known. From her graduate work at the University of Minnesota and from her thirteen years in the Smith College faculty she has gathered, also, much that is of interest to the public generally. There has always been zest in her teaching, and in her life.