situated in picturesque circumstances, being manors, having moats, being built on clifftops or on moors, and the style of teaching is often progressive, including experiments in self-expression, novel forms of exercise, and different social groups and activities for the girls. The narrative focuses on the girls, who tend to be between 14 and 15. Although they are high-spirited and active, they are not eccentric or directly conflicting with social norms, as had been the case with Tomboy fiction. They are adolescents, shown as being in a normal period of transition in their lives, with a restlessness that tends to be expressed by minor adventures such as climbing out of dormitory windows at night, playing pranks on one another and their teachers and searching for spies in their midst. They also typically develop their own behavioural codes, have a slang or secret language, which is exclusive to the school. The stories tend to focus on relationships between the pupils, including alliances between pairs and groups of girls, jealousy between them, and the experience of characters who feel excluded from the school community. Events which have become familiar from the girls' school fiction written since Brazil, are common, such as secret night-time meetings, achieving and receiving honours or prizes and events at the end of term such as concerts. In addition to her books, she also contributed a large number of school stories to children's annuals and the Girl's Own Paper. Antecedents and influences Brazil did not invent the story of boarding school life, although she was a major influence over its transformation. There was already an established tradition of fiction for young women, in which school life was presented as a crucible for their development. The Governess, or The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding, published in 1749, is generally seen as the first boarding school story. Fielding's novel was a moralistic tale with tangents offering instruction on behaviour, and each of the nine girls in the novel relate their story individually. However it did establish aspects of the boarding school story which were repeated in later works. The school is self-contained with little connection to local life, the girls are encouraged to live together with a sense of community and collective responsibility, and one of the characters experiences a sleepless night, a standard motif in subsequent girls' fiction. Fielding's approach was imitated and used as a formula by both her