In the original dust sheet. Green cloth binding with black and orange design on the front board and on the spine.

It is the intent of F.B.A. to provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this book offered so to almost stimulate your feel and touch on the book. If requested, more traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

Angela Brazil  30 November 1868 – 13 March 1947,  was one of the first British writers of “modern schoolgirls’ stories”, written from the characters’ point of view and intended primarily as entertainment rather than moral instruction. In the first half of the 20th century she published nearly 50 books of girls’ fiction, the vast majority being boarding school stories. She also published numerous short stories in magazines.

Her books were commercially successful, widely read by pre-adolescent girls, and influenced them. Though interest in girls’ school stories waned after World War II, her books remained popular until the 1960s. They were seen as disruptive and a negative influence on moral standards by some figures in authority during the height of their popularity, and in some cases were banned, or indeed burned, by headmistresses in British girls’ schools.

While her stories have been much imitated in more recent decades, and many of her motifs and plot elements have since become clichés or the subject of parody, they were innovative when they first appeared. Brazil made a major contribution to changing the nature of fiction for girls. She presented a young female point of view which was active, aware of current issues and independent-minded; she recognised adolescence as a time of transition, and accepted girls as having common interests and concerns which could be shared and acted upon.

Angela Brazil is frequently held to be largely responsible for establishing the girls’ school story genre, which exerted a major effect on the reading practices of girls for decades after she began publishing her novels, although this belief has been challenged. Her motifs and ideas have become a common part of popular imagination since publication and inspired many imitators and successors. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series draws upon many elements of English public school education fiction that Brazil’s work helped to establish. 

Towards the end of the 20th century, girls’ school stories had in many respects become seen as a cliché, with standard character types such as the oddball but courageous new girl and the practical but fair headmistress, and recurring scenes such as a midnight feast, pranks, heroic rescues and concert at the end of term. Many parodies of these types of stories have been produced. However, when Brazil first wrote schoolgirl tales, she was not simply repeating established norms in fiction for young women, and her approach (together with other girls’ writers of this period) was innovative and actually establishing new ideas about girls’ lives, which were simplified and turned into stock motifs by later writers.

Popular writers of girls’ school stories who certainly read Angela Brazil’s books include Elinor Brent-Dyer with her Chalet School series, and Enid Blyton with her tales about Malory Towers and St Clares. Brent-Dyer, whose first volume in the Chalet School series appeared in 1925, published 57 more books in the series and these books were still selling 150,000 copies a year in the late 1990s. Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Elsie Oxenham should also be mentioned and from the 21st century, Tyne O’Connell. Despite the fact that many of these stories included archaic motifs and representations, they still remain popular.