The first title, Girls of the Hamlet Club set the scene for the school aspects of the series, but it is the second title, The Abbey Girls, that introduces The Abbey – almost a character within the series in its own right – a romantic ruin that inspires love for it as a quiet, peaceful place, and creates the wish to behave in the public-spirited tradition of the early Cistercian monks.

As the club develops, its members learn Morris and Country Dancing, and prepare a May Queen ceremony for Cicely's grandparents.

[1] The Abbey Girls (1920) is the second title of the series, and tells of two red-headed cousins, Joan and Joy Shirley, and how, in different ways, they manage to get places at Miss Macey's School.

These two characters are the original 'Abbey Girls' and the series continues with stories about them and the friends they make throughout, not only their schooldays, but also their adult lives.

An early friend, Jen Robins,[2] soon becomes a major character, and others, Jandy Mac,[3] Rosamund and Maidlin,[4] can all claim the sobriquet 'Abbey Girl'.

By the end of the series[5] these six are all married with children, and the adventures of the daughters of Joan, Joy, Jandy and Jen, at the same school, have come to the fore.

Whilst she does not proselytise, her characters discuss the reasons behind good and bad happenings,[7] and grow in their own beliefs as they do so.

[8] One of the interests of collectors and EJO Society members is finding and visiting the original sites used by Oxenham in her books.

As well as the Bucks/Oxon area and the village of Washford, Somerset where Cleeve Abbey is situated, several books are set in parts of Sussex, Wales, Lancashire, the English Lake District and Scotland.

Naturally these are not always depicted exactly as their real counterparts; Oxenham was writing fiction, and if she could move an abbey nearly 200 miles for her purposes, surely changing a few names and telescoping or stretching distances was also well within her remit.