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.
Sepia-toned photograph of Angela Brazil, seated at a small desk, with a piece of paper on top, and a pen in her hand. One elbow is resting on the desk, with her arm held vertically and her head propped on her hand. She is wearing a loose-fitting dress with a pattern of abstract stitching, and a long necklace. There is a headband in her short, curly hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Liz Lochhead
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,