The Nicest Girl In The School by Angela Brazil

The Nicest Girl in the School by Angela Brazil

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s unsurprising that certain themes reoccur in Brazil’s work. She was immensely prolific and an author who, for the most, stuck to a particular age group and genre. She knew what she could do and she did it very well. The Nicest Girl In The School was her most popular title and also a relatively early one at that (1909) in a career that was going to run to the 1940s. It’s also a title that feels slightly different to her work. There’s no interminable interlude where somebody shares local folklore or tells a fairy story and neither is there a Suitable Elderly Woman to pash on (although we all do pash instead on the central character who is just a Very Good Egg And We All Love Her).

What there is, instead, is actually a really well-told and very genuine story about a girl just going to school and having adventures. Some of them are big, some of them are small, and all of them are just told in such a fresh and distinct way in contrast to other titles of the time that you get why this sold. This is a story that wears its moralising through the action of the characters involved. Gone is the kind of Victorian moment where we all stop and get a little lecture from one of the adult characters or the narrator tells us wistfully about a Higher Power Knowing Best when everybody suddenly carks it (v fond of the death stuff, them), and it’s all replaced by the girls having a sense of personal, practical and moral agency of their own. I can’t tell you how big a paradigm shift this was. And without that shift occurring, I don’t think we’d be writing or reading the books that we read today.

One last thing to note is that the original text features the n- word so please do be aware of that. More modern editions of The Nicest Girl In The School do exist and I suspect will have productively and rightfully addressed this.



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