Angela Brazil

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AB began writing children's plays about fairies, and progressed, during the first half of the twentieth century, through one bildungsroman for girls based on her own childhood and another on the experience of her mother, to a series of almost fifty book-length school stories for girls, besides stories and essays for magazines, and an autobiography. The predictability of formula fiction creeps gradually into her writing. Heroines indulge in mad escapades
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane.
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but entertain intense loyalty to friends, school, and country; they triumph in the end after wrestling with difficulty and sometimes persecution; they enter into hero-worshipping emotional involvement with each other or with teachers. Brazil's naive, enthusiastic, cliché-ridden style, studded with schoolgirl slang, carries readers along with compelling narrative energy.

Milestones

30 November 1869

AB was born at 1 Westcliffe Terrace, Preston, Lancashire; it was St Andrew's Day, which fitted nicely with her later self-identification as Celtic.
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane.
13

1910

AB hit her stride this year, publishing many contributions to magazines as well as several books, including The Nicest Girl in the School, which proved her most popular text: it sold 153,000 copies.
Freeman dates both this title and Bosom Friends (subtitled A Seaside Story) as 1909. Her dates often fall a year before those given by the British Library catalogue, as if she worked from submission rather than publication dates.
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane.
22
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

August 1946

AB published her final novel, The School on the Loch, for which she had gathered information in Scotland the previous summer.
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane.
138, 156

11 March 1947

AB died during the night, after a cheerful supper with her brother and sister, at home in Coventry.
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane.
138

Biography

Some time before 1911 AB changed the pronunciation of her surname to make it rhyme with dazzle. She liked to derive it from Hy Brazil, meaning fairy island; but reference books connect her surname with the word bres, meaning strife.
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane.
81-2

Birth, Family, Influences