Angela Brazil

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 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.