educational and professional openings for girls, this reflected a more general sense of a world where a wider enjoyment of life and opportunity was much more available for girls than had been the case. Changing norms in girls' fiction Much of the fiction for girls being published at the turn of the century was instructional, and focused on promoting self-sacrifice, moral virtues, dignity and aspiring to a settled position in an ordered society. Brazil's fiction presented energetic characters who openly challenged authority, were cheeky, perpetrated pranks, and lived in a world which celebrated their youth and in which adults and their concerns were sidelined. While popular with girls, Brazil's books were not approved of by many adults and even banned by some headmistresses, seeing them as subversive and damaging to young minds. In 1936 Ethel Strudwick, principal of St Paul's Girls' School in London, reacted to a novella about the school by announcing at morning prayers that she would gather all of Brazil's books and set them alight. Brazil's own fiction also changed to reflect developing attitudes and changing social mores and the changing expectations of her readers. Her stories written before 1914, the beginning of the First World War, lean more towards issues of character that were typical in Victorian fiction for girls. Those written after this become more critical of this approach, and the heroines more liberated, in parallel with changing possibilities and attitudes towards girls and their potential to become more active in wider aspects of society. Parallel to developments in fiction for boys Boys' school stories were popular from the 1870s until the 1930s and continued to find an audience into the 1970s. Prominent writers included Talbot Baines Reed, and Charles Hamilton, who wrote under a number of pen names, including Frank Richards, as author of the successful Greyfriars School series. Anthony Buckeridge later wrote the Jennings books. Themes between boys' and girls' school fiction had some commonality, such as sports, honour, and friendship. It has been claimed that the appearance of girls' boarding school stories was a response to a parallel development of the equivalent for boys in the same period, and there are certainly elements of boys' stories, such as Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, and the Greyfriars tales by Frank Richards, appear to have been borrowed by writers of girls' stories, including Brazil. However, this may accord an undue influence to this