Jandy Mac Comes Back by Elsie J. Oxenham

Jandy Mac Comes Back is a grand reunion in book form. I imagine that a devoted Elsie J. Oxenham reader devouring it when it was first published in 1941 would have revelled in all of the detail about what beloved characters from earlier titles in the Abbey series have been doing since they left school and got married. But for me, a relative newcomer, it was a bit confusing.

Among Elsie J. Oxenham aficionados, Jandy Mac Comes Back is known as "A29" and the start of a run of books known as the "Second Generation Titles". I've only read two other Abbey books so far, both of which I picked up at random earlier in 2025 (Maid of the Abbey in July and The Abbey Girls in Town in August) but I'm slowly getting to grips with the overlapping chronology and recurring, multi-generational character structure. Still, a lot of the references in this one went over my head and I had to do some extra research to make sense of all the characters that have names beginning with J. Allison Thompson's Abbey writings have been particularly helpful for this.

This is a reunion story in every sense. "Jandy Mac" of the title, Janice Fraser née MacDonald, has returned to England after many years married life in Samoa and Australia. With her is her thirteen year old daughter Joan, named after one of Jandy's schoolfriends and main Abbey girl, Joan Shirley. Jandy has decided to surprise her friends by turning up at their homes after over a decade away with no warning. Fairly predictably, this goes wrong. The friends are either away from home or, in Joan's case, have just that morning given birth to a new baby. Luckily, Jandy and her Joan (aka "Littlejan" or "Joan-Two" to avoid confusion) are scooped up by another Abbey girl, Rosamund, now Lady Kentisbury, and taken to stay in her castle while other friends are tracked down.

Everyone gradually gets up to date on each other's family histories, and there are a few surprises and adventures too. One Abbey girl, Jen, makes a sudden departure to Yorkshire (and out of the book's narrative) when her husband is in a car accident at their farm there. Then the world of Kentisbury Castle (apparently based on Arundel) is rocked when kidnappers, working in collusion with the Earl's chauffeur, steal several of the household's children in the hope of ransoming the heir. Jandy, her daughter, and the housekeeper's niece Tansy all perform various acts of heroism. Soon, all children have been returned to their rightful place unharmed and the malefactors are in custody. The gratitude expressed towards Jandy Mac and her daughter renew their ties to the Abbey crowd and promise greater interaction in future books. Unlike in the other two I've read, there is no folk dancing or May queen stuff in this one, which was slightly disappointing.

My other quibble with this book concerns Jandy Mac's great act of heroism. She happens to be riding towards the picnic cove as the children are being abducted and sees the struggle. Tansy and three kids are taken away on a boat, while Jandy's daughter Joan is left lying on the shore, perhaps unconscious, perhaps dead. Instead of going to her aid, Jandy turns her horse around and gallops straight back to the castle's village to raise the alarm. Afterwards, she is much praised for overcoming the maternal instinct to care for her child in order to protect the kidnapped heir to the castle.

This reads strangely to the modern eye. Without any way of getting help other than going herself, Jandy did have to think and act quickly, and the kidnappers were already away. But it's odd that she doesn't even do a quick triage check of the survivor before riding off — and even odder that this, more than her fast and daring riding, is what she's lauded for. Given how focused the rest of the book is on the demands of motherhood above all else, this felt out of place and reminded me of the similarly illogical behaviour during the kidnapping plot in Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's The Princess of the Chalet School. I know expecting realism from early twentieth century school stories is silly, but characters usually behave with some internal consistency to their world!

Despite this, and despite the fact that for me reading this book is a bit like overhearing a reunion conversation between people you don't know, I still enjoyed it, which I think is testament to Oxenham's breezy prose and knack for stringing events together with good momentum. As my experience shows, you can read it without a full knowledge of everything that has gone before, but it might be better if you do come upon it in the proper seqeuence. I feel like I'm inching ever closer to having to become a non-casual Abbey fan and actually start reading these books in order...