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larryhammerObservations from binging on a dozen century-old schoolgirl novels by Angela Brazil:
Brazil (pronounced "brazzle") was the pioneering best-seller of her genre, the writer who codified girls school stories told from the point-of-view of the adolescent characters instead of a moralizing narrator. One result of this is that she can get caught in a Seinfeld Is Unfunny trap, as her original-for-the-time plots were copied so much they now read like cliches. One mitigation is, however, to read her before Brent-Dyer or Blyton.
And boy howdy her girls are adolescent -- vigorously, energetically, sportily, caught-up-in-it-all adolescent.
The schools are set all over Britain, often in scenic locales that are deftly evoked: Yorkshire Dales, Northern Wales, coast of Cornwall, and so on, and the local color affects the school's social setting. Said social settings are also varied. More books are set in boarding schools than day schools, but not overwhelmingly more, and it's interesting to compare the two -- how going home at night with the liberty of the town creates a different tone from the sealed world of a boarding school. School sizes range from 20 to a few hundred pupils,** with a median of around 50 -- and size also affects the society, with larger schools being more strict about hierarchy. The slang is especially fascinating: not only do certain common colloquial usages evolve over time, each school has its own fashions. Each society its own world.
Stories generally cover a school year from September to July, but there are variations (two full years, a single trimester term). A typical protagonist is 14 or 15, but a few are in their last year of school (17 or 18, almost ready to wear hair pinned up). The internal arc of a younger protagonist tends to involve growing, by at least a little bit, out of adolescent self-absorption into awareness of communal society; the older ones are more focused on deciding a life and career path -- and careers are expected "in this modern age." Often someone, either the protagonist or another main character, is new to the environment and has to be acculturated to the school's behavioral norms. The more outsider the newbie (those from Ireland, New Zealand, Germany,*** America) the more polish is deemed needed.
External plot tends to be light -- and the one with the heaviest (The Head Girl at The Gables) is not entirely successful, though this no so much due to the predictability of the wartime espionage plot as that there were so many story threads that the book has almost no focus. The foundling story of A Pair of Schoolgirls worked much better, as it dovetailed neatly into both the friendship story and the finding the protagonist's place in the school story. I'm still undecided on Loyal to the School, where the protagonist becomes an assistant teacher to pay her tuition, which shoehorns her into the school almost too tightly.
Instead, most plots are loosely connected episodes strung out over the rhythms a school year, with conflicts developed out of contrasting friendships and rivalries. (Stories with high-spirited protagonists are, oddly enough, especially prone to mechanically alternating the two types of conflicts.) Friendships are sometimes within a small group but more commonly in pairs, with some of the BFFs "warm" enough to call a romantic two-girl friendship, to use the TV Tropes term -- and as that article notes, "The more conservative the age, the more romantically you can describe the friendship, since it wouldn't occur to anyone to read it differently." (See also Wikipedia on romantic friendship, which notes that the set of behaviors that coded as homosexual expanded some time around the 1920s to encompass acts that previously had been regarded as part of intense, non-sexual friendship.) There are also fashions for adoring various older female figures. And all sorts of short-term fads in hobbies, and other things.
Almost entirely absent: boys (except for brothers). The one whiff of heterosexuality is an embarrassing mistake -- though there are mentions of, e.g., an engagement ring on a teacher's hand, a cousin marrying. Not at all absent: the Great War, and its effects on women and their families. The War-time books are in some ways the most interesting, despite the jingoism, and I wish I'd read them in order.
Cracking good stuff, if it's the stuff you're looking for. Brazil is especially good at the details of raw adolescence. Reader consensus is that her best books are from 1911-30, after she caught her voice but before she became formulaic. All are out of print, but most of them from before 1923 are available through Project Gutenberg.
Books read: The Nicest Girl in the School (1909), The New Girl at St Chad's (1911), A Pair of Schoolgirls (1912), The Youngest Girl in the Fifth (1913), The School by the Sea (1914), For the Sake of the School (1915), The Jolliest Term on Record (1915), The Luckiest Girl in the School (1916), A Patriotic Schoolgirl (1918), The Head Girl at The Gables (1919), A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl (1919), Loyal to the School (1921).
* It is sometimes speculated that Brazil's popularity eventually waned because she didn't write series, but I'm dubious of the theory's glibness. Also, the timing, as her books were still selling well in the '60s, over a generation after series became the norm for the genre.
** Those well over 100 are all day schools with kindergarten through sixth form, rather than schools just with the upper forms.
*** Technically the German girl is English, but she's been living overseas.
---L.
Brazil (pronounced "brazzle") was the pioneering best-seller of her genre, the writer who codified girls school stories told from the point-of-view of the adolescent characters instead of a moralizing narrator. One result of this is that she can get caught in a Seinfeld Is Unfunny trap, as her original-for-the-time plots were copied so much they now read like cliches. One mitigation is, however, to read her before Brent-Dyer or Blyton.
And boy howdy her girls are adolescent -- vigorously, energetically, sportily, caught-up-in-it-all adolescent.
If indeed the gentle, grey-robed nuns who long, long ago had stolen silently along those very same stairs could have come back to survey the scene of their former activities, I fear on this particular occasion they would have wrung their slim, transparent hands in horror over the stalwart modern maidens who had succeeded them in possession of the ancient, rambling house. No pale-faced novices these, with downcast eyes and cheeks sunken with fasting; no timid glances, no soft ethereal footfalls or gliding garments—the old order had changed indeed, and yielded place to a rosy, racy, healthy, hearty, well-grown set of twentieth-century schoolgirls, overflowing with vigorous young life and abounding spirits, mentally and physically fit, and about as different from their mediaeval forerunners as a hockey stick is from a spindle.
—from The School by the Sea
Brazil's prose is clear and brisk (the above loquaciousness is uncharacteristic), and the characterization superb: each protagonist has different strengths and weaknesses, and Brazil understood how those shape each character's reactions. And there's quite a variety, as each novel is set in a different school with different characters -- each book a stand-alone (though I understand a couple later books are direct sequels).*The schools are set all over Britain, often in scenic locales that are deftly evoked: Yorkshire Dales, Northern Wales, coast of Cornwall, and so on, and the local color affects the school's social setting. Said social settings are also varied. More books are set in boarding schools than day schools, but not overwhelmingly more, and it's interesting to compare the two -- how going home at night with the liberty of the town creates a different tone from the sealed world of a boarding school. School sizes range from 20 to a few hundred pupils,** with a median of around 50 -- and size also affects the society, with larger schools being more strict about hierarchy. The slang is especially fascinating: not only do certain common colloquial usages evolve over time, each school has its own fashions. Each society its own world.
Stories generally cover a school year from September to July, but there are variations (two full years, a single trimester term). A typical protagonist is 14 or 15, but a few are in their last year of school (17 or 18, almost ready to wear hair pinned up). The internal arc of a younger protagonist tends to involve growing, by at least a little bit, out of adolescent self-absorption into awareness of communal society; the older ones are more focused on deciding a life and career path -- and careers are expected "in this modern age." Often someone, either the protagonist or another main character, is new to the environment and has to be acculturated to the school's behavioral norms. The more outsider the newbie (those from Ireland, New Zealand, Germany,*** America) the more polish is deemed needed.
External plot tends to be light -- and the one with the heaviest (The Head Girl at The Gables) is not entirely successful, though this no so much due to the predictability of the wartime espionage plot as that there were so many story threads that the book has almost no focus. The foundling story of A Pair of Schoolgirls worked much better, as it dovetailed neatly into both the friendship story and the finding the protagonist's place in the school story. I'm still undecided on Loyal to the School, where the protagonist becomes an assistant teacher to pay her tuition, which shoehorns her into the school almost too tightly.
Instead, most plots are loosely connected episodes strung out over the rhythms a school year, with conflicts developed out of contrasting friendships and rivalries. (Stories with high-spirited protagonists are, oddly enough, especially prone to mechanically alternating the two types of conflicts.) Friendships are sometimes within a small group but more commonly in pairs, with some of the BFFs "warm" enough to call a romantic two-girl friendship, to use the TV Tropes term -- and as that article notes, "The more conservative the age, the more romantically you can describe the friendship, since it wouldn't occur to anyone to read it differently." (See also Wikipedia on romantic friendship, which notes that the set of behaviors that coded as homosexual expanded some time around the 1920s to encompass acts that previously had been regarded as part of intense, non-sexual friendship.) There are also fashions for adoring various older female figures. And all sorts of short-term fads in hobbies, and other things.
Almost entirely absent: boys (except for brothers). The one whiff of heterosexuality is an embarrassing mistake -- though there are mentions of, e.g., an engagement ring on a teacher's hand, a cousin marrying. Not at all absent: the Great War, and its effects on women and their families. The War-time books are in some ways the most interesting, despite the jingoism, and I wish I'd read them in order.
Cracking good stuff, if it's the stuff you're looking for. Brazil is especially good at the details of raw adolescence. Reader consensus is that her best books are from 1911-30, after she caught her voice but before she became formulaic. All are out of print, but most of them from before 1923 are available through Project Gutenberg.
Books read: The Nicest Girl in the School (1909), The New Girl at St Chad's (1911), A Pair of Schoolgirls (1912), The Youngest Girl in the Fifth (1913), The School by the Sea (1914), For the Sake of the School (1915), The Jolliest Term on Record (1915), The Luckiest Girl in the School (1916), A Patriotic Schoolgirl (1918), The Head Girl at The Gables (1919), A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl (1919), Loyal to the School (1921).
* It is sometimes speculated that Brazil's popularity eventually waned because she didn't write series, but I'm dubious of the theory's glibness. Also, the timing, as her books were still selling well in the '60s, over a generation after series became the norm for the genre.
** Those well over 100 are all day schools with kindergarten through sixth form, rather than schools just with the upper forms.
*** Technically the German girl is English, but she's been living overseas.
---L.