UVA History of Childhood, Parenting, and Family Building-addition 86 Dorothy Marion Fleming Journal

Content Description

Content warning: this material contains offensive and racist language. Specifically, a racist word is used on one page titled "Les Marécottes." This addition to MSS 16758, The University of Virginia Collection on the History of Childhood, Parenting, and Family Building, contains the journal of Dorothy Marion Fleming (1894-1982) documenting her year at the Chateau Brillantmont boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the years leading up to World War I. Fleming was born in Chorlton near Manchester, the youngest daughter of a prosperous merchant family. The journal, titled "Mons Pensionnat Journal Intime," a commercially bound blank book, was designed for boarding school students like Fleming. There are 104 pages of handwritten entries in English and French, pasted photographs, original drawings, postcards, and ephemera, mounted realia, and a single sheet of Braille alphabet pasted in, documenting Dorothy Marion Fleming's time as a student at the Chateau Brillantmont boarding school in Lausanne in the years leading up to World War I. Pre-printed pages offer the diarist spaces to enter the names and photos of friends and roommates, to paste in class photos and caption them with names, to mount souvenirs of day trips and concerts, and to invite their cohort to engage with them through messages and notes. Fleming's English roommate, May Langford, appears, alongside Amy E. Mahlmann of Japan, whose English adventurer father, John Mahlmann, brought her from Yokohama to Switzerland; the German-born Gertrude Frebel; Anglo-American Dorothy Browne; and Swiss Eva Lordy. Other classmates report their origins from Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, and the Netherlands as well. Fleming documents her courses, the theatre performances she attends, and the parties that shape her life in Lausanne. Many of these emphasize music, as Fleming listens to violin and piano performances (later sections that include ephemera support this as she inserts and marks up several concert programs that include Franz Liszt and Claude Debussy). Another section title, "Ma Chambre," features a drawing of Fleming and Langford's shared dormitory room, showing how they arranged their beds, furniture, and a piano.

Acquisition Type

Purchase

Provenance

Purchased from Marginalia, 11 September 2025.

Language of Description

English

Script of Description

Latin

Restrictions Apply

No