Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Angela Brazil
-
Standard Name: Brazil, Angela
Birth Name: 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
Freeman, Gillian. The Schoolgirl Ethic: The Life and Work of Angela Brazil. Allen Lane, 1976.
133
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.
"Angela Brazil" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7d/Angela_Brazil%2C_early_1920s.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
As a child she loved reading (including the school stories of Angela Brazil
), painting, drawing, and listening to the radio; she was already at this age anxious about the threat of atomic war.
Lochhead, Liz. “Ice”. Mslexia, pp. 26 - 7.
26
Smith, Ali. “Liz Lochhead: Speaking in Her Own Voice”. Liz Lochhead’s Voices, edited by Robert Crawford and Anne Varty, Edinburgh University Press, 1993, pp. 1 - 16.
3-4, 13
Education
Olivia Manning
At home Olivia was encouraged to love poetry, learned to read by the time she was four, and was later subjected to piano lessons which taught her nothing. As a teenager and thinking of herself...
Friends, Associates
Marie Stopes
MS
corresponded for years, if occasionally, with the school-story writer Angela Brazil
, who sent the first letter on 22 May 1922, and apparently admired Stopes's work. They shared not only a publisher, Blackie
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Brigid Brophy
One of the twelve sections is no more fifty words. The novel's decadent style inhabits the minds of several characters, particularly that of the tall, fragile, perpetually exhausted but secretly sexually voracious Antonia Mount. Her...
Literary responses
Dorothy Bussy
Apart from her familial and social connections, it is for Olivia that DB
is most frequently noted in literary criticism and biography. In Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships (1984), Martha Vicinus
observes that Olivia...
Textual Production
Marie Stopes
MS
must have been still at the threshold of her career as a dramatist when she proposed to Angela Brazil
that she should do a stage adaptation of one of Brazil's school stories. Brazil quashed...
Timeline
By December 1916
Bessie Marchant
, who had been publishing adventure storiesfor girls and for boys since around 1892, issued one of several books using First World War experience: A Girl Munition Worker,