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She wrote what were probably the first "We're so schoolgirlie!" type of stories, don't you know!
When last I looked, they don't have any Angela Brazil books at Amazon, neither .com not .co.uk! We say, "Piggy", don't we, gels!
When the distinction between boys', girls' (and between children's and adults') fiction has all but disappeared, it is perhaps not easy for us to understand the impact of Angela Brazil's schoolgirl stories when they started to appear at the turn of the century. Here was a series of stories, targeted specifically at a certain group - the increasingly emancipated young ladies of the twentieth century - and they were welcomed with great enthusiasm.
Angela Brazil was not the first writer to produce school stories for girls - L.T. Meade (1854-1914) was a hugely prolific author of such stories in the second half of the nineteenth century - but Angela Brazil created a new genre that changed the direction they were to take in the coming years.
For the first time, growing girls could read books that were slanted towards their own point of view: Angela Brazil presented them with a whole race of jolly, sporty, robust and, above all, believable role models. The heroines of her books may have been, on the one hand, silly or vain or selfish and pig-headed; or, alternatively, they may have been reliable, well-meaning or happy-go-lucky, but whatever their characteristics, a mutual tolerance ensured that they all managed to co-exist happily and learn from each other's experiences. A far cry from the moralistic fables of the preceding era!
Their popularity was not, alas, shared by the majority of "real life" head-mistresses, who seem to have particularly abhorred the schoolgirl slang that peppers the books. Today it seems harmless enough to most people, but at the time there were voices raised to have the books banned or even burned. As Angela Brazil's fictional head-teachers were usually portrayed very sympathetically, this hardly seems fair, but Angela Brazil was quite unperturbed by the opposition to her books, continuing to turn them out at the average of two a year for almost half a century.
A further reason for the books' instant popularity must have been their pleasing appearance. Published in most cases by Blackie & Son in coloured pictorial boards, and many with lively full-page illustrations, they look attractive and instantly readable. The early books in particular have reached almost cult status now, and are very collectable indeed. It must be emphasised, though, that prices do vary considerably: it is the early books, complete with their very scarce dust-wrappers, that fetch the highest prices today.
There is general agreement that in order to write convincingly for children, a writer must possess certain qualities. Angela Brazil set down the ideal prerequisites in an article published in 1923. She wrote: "To be able to write for young people depends, I consider, largely upon whether you are able to retain your early attitude of mind while acquiring a certain facility with your pen. It is a mistake ever to grow up! I confess I am still an absolute schoolgirl in my sympathies."
Miss Brazil managed to preserve this Peter Pan quality not only in her work, but to a large extent in her life also. She never married, living with her sister Amy and brother Clarence (they were known as the "holy trinity") throughout her adult life. She was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1869 of mixed Scottish/Irish/Spanish ancestry.
Although inheriting the lively dark good looks of her half-Spanish mother, she thought of herself as "Celtic to the core" - something she shared with several of her schoolgirl heroines, although their Celticism took the form of little more than a rather whimsical belief in pixies and fairies. Angela was the fourth and last child in the family, and appears to have dominated with her own brand of charm and self-will. Indeed, acquaintances later in life spoke of her rather intimidating charm.
Her mother was a great story-teller and became the chief influence in young Angela's life, while her father remained a distant but kindly figure, who used to refer to his daughters as his "dear little silly-billies" when they failed to grasp esoteric scientific data. But all the Brazil children were intelligent and talented. They drew and painted, and played musical instruments. Though Angela was not musically gifted herself, she did display a particular faculty for the written word.
This talent first blossomed into print in 1899, when T.W. Paterson of Edinburgh published "The Mischievous Brownie", one of five children's plays written by Angela in her youth. Described by her biographer Gillian Freeman as "a mixture of archness, sophistication and grand guignol", there is no record of its critical reception or popularity. We only know that this slim volume cost just 3d on publication.
After contributions to various periodicals, including "Our School Magazine" and "Burgon's Magazine", Angela Brazil embarked on her first substantial piece of fiction. "A Terrible Tomboy", published by Gay & Bird in 1904, is largely autobiographical - with embellishments and enhancements that were typical of Angela. It is not a school story; rather it relates the life of Peggy, taking her from childhood to young womanhood, and declaring in its final pages: "Peggy will keep the most priceless of possessions, the heart of a little child, without which . . . it is impossible to enter the kingdom of heaven".
Perhaps not surprisingly, the book contains elements of the religious preoccupations of her early childhood and is highly romanticised, but, nevertheless, it received favourable reviews on publication in 1904. The "Manchester Guardian" noted: "There is more humour and less sentiment in this clever book than we have found in most new stories of this kind"; while other reviews found it "amusing, enjoyable, charming".
It is interesting to compare "A Terrible Tomboy", which is, after all, autobiographical fiction, with her "real" autobiography, "My Own Schooldays", published by Blackie in 1925. In the latter, the robust down-to-earth qualities that enhance the school stories seem to have deserted her and the whimsy all but takes over. Most readers will infinitely prefer the style of "A Terrible Tomboy".
They will, however, find it a very difficult book to get hold of. Some dealers have never seen a copy of the first edition. Alone among Miss Brazil's books, it was published with illustrations by Angela and her sister Amy, making this scarce volume all the more desirable to Brazil collectors.
Two more years were to pass before the publication of Angela Brazil's first schoolgirl story. "The Fortunes of Philippa" (Blackie, 1906) was based on the experiences of Angelica, Angela Brazil's mother, who had arrived from Rio de Janeiro as a young girl, only to be plunged straight into the life of a Victorian girls’ boarding school.
The only one of Angela Brazil's books to be written in the first person, "The Fortunes of Philippa" is untypical of her work for this reason and because it depicts a boarding school life that is harsh and unkind in the extreme — a far cry from the firm but fair regimes of her later books. Angela Brazil wrote the book from cover to cover three times before submitting it for publication - a method she was to use for all subsequent titles.
Despite the rather ponderous, and still very "Victorian", style the book was a resounding success, and it encouraged its author to concentrate on the school story from then on, though she never used the first person style again.
Blackie now commissioned "The Third Class at Miss Kaye's" (1908), "The Nicest Girl in the School" (1909 - a perennially popular title with fans), and "The Manor House School" (1910, with illustrations by F. Moorsom). Meanwhile, Nelson issued "Bosom Friends, A Seaside Story", also in 1910.
These books show Angela Brazil perfecting a style that came to fruition in "A Fourth Form Friendship" (1911), which could be termed vintage Brazil. Here are all the ingredients that go to making up the next thirty or so books. In plentiful supply is the now very dated slang that used to incense teachers so much: pleasant experiences are termed "blossomly", "chubby" or "jinky", and unpleasant things are decidedly "piggy". The stiff upper lip is as prevalent as in boys' stories: girls are always being exhorted to "brace up and be sporty" and "turn off the waterworks". And as a reward for all this bracing up, there were sweet treats galore, cheesecake being a particularly sought-after favourite among the girls.
Angela Brazil had a special penchant for choosing unusual names for her characters: Ethelburga, Raymonde, Aldred, Myfanwy, Morvyth, for example, and there is even a young damsel named Peachy! Miss Brazil seemed particularly attached to the name Lesbia, which was given to several important characters: Lesbia Ferrars in "Loyalty to the School", for instance, and Lesbia Carrington in "For the School Colours". Both of these seem to have been largely self portraits, suitably idealised (tempting, perhaps, to conclude she was declaring her own true colours here - BB).
Romantic friendships abound in the books, but there was plenty of adventure, too. Girls are often marooned through their own foolishness ("The School by the Sea", "The School on the Moor", "A Fourth Form Friendship", "The School on the Cliff" etc.); and there are several shipwrecks ("The Fortunes of Philippa", "Bosom Friends" and "The Leader of the Lower School", in which American Gypsy Latimer is picked up in a lifeboat from a stormy sea).
Fostering and adopting children was another theme in several stories, and others tell of missing wills, long-lost relatives who suddenly reappear, and - a stock plot from Victorian times - the girl of apparently humble birth who turns out to have aristocratic connections.
The girls really came into their own during the years of the Great War, which sparked off a number of books (roughly "The School by the Sea" to "A Patriotic Schoolgirl") that stand out from the rest in their call for heroism and patriotism. Sentences such as "It is the duty of every British girl to make every possible sacrifice to keep those unspeakable Hun out of our islands" are easy to parody now, but the fact of war gave an added excitement and impetus to the books written at the time.
Peacetime called for a different attitude from womenfolk: those who had worked in munitions factories and on the land now had to turn themselves back into home-makers, and Angela Brazil tried to reflect this attitude in the post-war books. However, her declaration in "A Popular Schoolgirl" (1920) that "women's greatest and strongest weapons are love and sweetness" somehow fails to capture the real essence of Angela and her athletic, emancipated schoolgirls.
In the years between the two wars, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elinor Brent-Dyer and Elsie Oxenham all vied with Angela Brazil for the new generation of schoolgirls with a whole host of new school stories, but Angela reigned supreme well into the 1930s. After about 1931, though, her style became rather mechanical and, not surprisingly perhaps after producing so many books, she appeared to be writing to a formula.
But she remained very popular, and in 1936 still had the power to ruffle a few feathers. In an instance related in Gillian Freeman's biography, "The Schoolgirl Ethic", a new girl at St Paul's School in London was stunned by a dramatic address from the Principal expressing her wish to collect all the Brazil books and personally consign them to a bonfire!
Such Brazil baiting seems rather unfair. Besides the harmless enjoyment her stories gave thousands of girls for well over half a century, they must have widened their horizons in many ways. Angela Brazil's books championed music and the visual arts as well as featuring historical, geographical, botanical, archaeological and literary themes.
The topics in Angela Brazil's books were those that preoccupied her in daily life. She was a passionate conservationist and environmentalist very much ahead of her time, and a member of the Natural History and Scientific Society in her adopted home town of Coventry. An inveterate committee worker, nature walker and organiser of parties and soirees (in true Brazil style, party games and funny hats were obligatory, not always to the joy of all concerned), she appears to have had abundant energy. When she died in 1947, she was in the middle of her forty-ninth school novel.
It is on record that when someone in the Blackie office heard the news of her death, he suggested that it wouldn't be long before they received the manuscript of "The School at the Pearly Gates" - an irreverent remark, perhaps, but an indication of her prolificacy!
An ability to draw was also one of Angela Brazil's accomplishments - she and her sister illustrated her first book, "A Terrible Tomboy" - and she took a great interest in the appearance of her books and the illustrations that accompany most of them. Her favourite illustrator was Balliol Salmon, whose tall, graceful, attractive young women graced the pages of seven books between 1915 and 1920. Other illustrators from the Golden Years (between 1910 and 1931) included Frank Wiles, W.E. Wightman and Treyer Evans.
Throughout her career, Angela Brazil contributed articles to various journals and periodicals - such as "Burgon's and "Our School" mentioned earlier; and the monthly magazine "Little Folks", which she had read and enjoyed from an early age. Some of these tales - usually aimed at a younger readership - were published in volume form: "The Slap Bang Boys" (1917), "Two Little Scamps and a Puppy" (1919, with illustrations by E. Blampied) and "The Khaki Boys and other Stories" (1923), were all published by Nelson in smaller format than the school stories. They are not as visually attractive as most of the books, but they seem to be relatively scarce in first edition. Two other similar volumes are "Queen of the Dormitory and other Stories" (Cassell, 1926, with illustrations by P.B. Hickling) and "A Gift from the Sea" (Nelson, 1920, with illustrations by A.E. Jackson).
It is not difficult to identify the first editions of those titles up to 1914, as they were all dated; and all first edition titles up to and including "The Luckiest Girl in the School" (1916) had gilt lettering on the spine. Publication dates began to reappear in the l930s, but identifying firsts that appeared between 1917 and the early l930s can be a little tricky.
Perhaps the easiest way is to check the list of book titles usually given on the half-title page. If the title in question heads the list, the chances are that you have a first edition. However, this is not an invariable rule. Sometimes comparing bindings can yield information; the primary bindings are often quite elaborate, whereas later editions tend to have more simplified designs. Again, novice collectors are warned that this is not always the case.
The most elaborate and attractive pictorial covers appeared on the books up to and including "Joan's Best Chum"; (1926), after which covers were semi-pictorial until "The Little Green School" (1931). From this time on, covers were completely plain, and collectors usually want these complete with their dust-wrappers, even if they are happy with pictorial boards on the preceding books.
Many collectors, of course, are quite happy with later editions. Enthusiasts who only want firsts, on the other hand, usually find that they have to be content with unadorned copies of the early first editions; it is a scarce pre-mid l920s Brazil that sports a good, clean dust-wrapper! In such cases, values can double or even treble! I recently came across a very nice first edition copy of "For the School Colours" (1918), with illustrations by Balliol Salmon. The question of values is, as ever, a vexed one. They vary tremendously. As any book dealer will tell you, a book is worth whatever a collector is prepared to pay for it. But whether you choose copies with or without their original wrappers, first editions or later issues, your Angela Brazil titles will form an immensely enjoyable and attractive collection.
Where can you get all those old, out of print ANGELA BRAZIL books? Here!
However, if you fancy searching Amazon.com for any li'l ol'thang at all....why not go direct from here!
This article was adapted from one written by Katharine Gunn published in the May 1990 issue of Book and Magazine Collector Magazine.
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