Angela Brazil, writer of schoolgirl stories

Angela Brazil (pronounced “Brazzle” and not as the name of the country) was a writer of stories for girls who was once far better known than she is today. Her popularity waned as the world she wrote about changed out of all recognition and, to be frank, writers of much better quality came along to take her place.

She was born at Preston, Lancashire, on 30th November 1868, the fourth child and younger daughter of Clarence Brazil and his wife Angelica. He was the manager of a cotton mill, and was of Irish ancestry, and she was half-Spanish. The family was far from wealthy, but neither were they on the breadline.

Angela was educated at a succession of private girls’ schools as the family moved around the county, and at one time was a boarder in the hostel of Ellerslie Ladies’ College, Manchester. She was successful academically but was most interested in botany and art. On leaving school, she and her sister studied in London at Heatherley's Art School.

Her early adulthood was somewhat unsettled. She worked briefly as a governess but then returned to the family home to help her elderly parents. When her father died in 1899 she moved with her mother and sister to north Wales, where the family had a holiday cottage, but a period of travel followed during which she moved around Europe and the Near East.

From 1915, after her mother’s death, Angela Brazil lived in Coventry with her sister Amy and her brother Walter, and they stayed there for the rest of their lives, participating in cultural and social events and being active members of St Michael’s Church.

Angela was a fairly late developer as a writer, with her first school story, “The Fortunes of Philippa”, not being published until 1906 (although her first published work had been a children’s story called “A Terrible Tomboy” dating from 1904). However, once she started to write there was no stopping her, and 47 more school novels followed, the last one appearing in 1946, the year before she died.

Angela Brazil’s output is generally regarded as the epitomé of the “jolly hockey sticks” school of writing, with her characters being upper class girls who are concerned mostly with making and breaking friendships and the rights and wrongs of personal loyalty and fair play. To an extent that is true, and titles such as “Joan’s Best Chum” (1926), “Jill’s Jolliest School” (1937) and “Five Jolly Schoolgirls” (1941) would seem to bear out this impression. It is also important to note that the flow of stories emanating from this closed world of the girls’ school continued unabated through two world wars and the upheavals of the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism in Europe, none of which seemed to impinge much on the lives of her characters.

However, it must also be remembered that Angela Brazil was writing for a very specific audience, namely pre-adolescent and adolescent girls, who had a right to be sheltered from all the nasty things that were going on in the adult world. If the “jolly hockey sticks” world was a fantasy, what was wrong with that if the intended audience belonged to that world and deserved a measure of protection from the real one?

It should also be pointed out that, although the initial setting of most of the stories was a girls’ school, the plots did not always stay there. There is often a mystery element in the stories that takes the characters away from school, and it is fair to say that Angela Brazil wrote more about schoolgirls than about schools. When so doing she was content to allow her characters to work through their dilemmas according to their own lights, as girls, and not to impose an adult’s moral superiority by judging their actions. Unfortunately, despite this tendency, or maybe because of it, she was not particularly skilled in creating memorable characters, and they come across as being fairly shallow, with little concept of the world beyond their closed society.

As mentioned above, Angela Brazil’s books are mostly forgotten today. They are hopelessly outdated, and were indeed largely so at the time of their writing, given that her concepts of school life were based on her own schooldays in the 1880s. They are also books that gave entertainment to their readers at the time but were not substantial or well-written enough to create the sort of interest that makes readers return to some more memorable children’s books in adult life. 

However, the sheer volume of Angela Brazil’s output, and the lack of much competition in the marketplace, brought her considerable wealth and reputation. She did not invent the genre of the girls’ school story, neither did she do a great deal to develop it, but she won through by creating a devoted following which she kept supplied for many years, with new generation of readers discovering her books as the older ones dropped away.

Angela Brazil died at her home in Coventry on 13^th March 1947, at the age of 78. She never married.

© John Welford