The Leader of the Lower School by Angela Brazil

First published: 1913; illustrated

Type of work: Social realism

Themes: Education, family, and friendship

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Briarcroft Hall, the Lake District, England

Principal Characters:

• Gipsy Latimer, the high-spirited fourteen-year-old title character
• Mr. Latimer, her father, a mining engineer
• Miss Poppleton, the principal of Briarcroft Hall, who is a severe and strict disciplinarian
• Edith Poppleton, her unassertive sister, the school’s matron and a confidante of Gipsy
• Meg Gordon, Gipsy’s best friend
• Daisy Scatcherd, nicknamed Scatterbrains, a classmate of Gipsy, who is known for her absentmindedness
• Leonora Parker, another new pupil, the spoiled and selfish daughter of a millionaire

The Story

The Leader of the Lower School spans an entire English school year at Briarcroft Hall and traces the many successes and reversals of misfortune which occur in the life of Azalea Latimer. She has been nicknamed Gipsy since early childhood because of her dark complexion and hair and her travels as the daughter of a colonial mining engineer.

Gipsy’s sudden arrival arouses much curiosity and excitement in the other schoolgirls. An extrovert from abroad, she establishes her presence almost immediately. Gipsy soon bridles at the school’s restrictive authority, exerted by Miss Poppleton, the severe principal. She recounts the circumstances which have brought her to Briarcroft: Returning to England, she and her father were shipwrecked off the French coast, losing all of their possessions and business assets and records. In order to return to southern Africa to reestablish his business, her father has placed her at the well-reputed Briarcroft Hall girls’ school. Gipsy is despondent at being separated from her only parent for the first time, but she throws herself into school life to compensate.

She establishes herself as a rallying point for the disgruntled and submissive girls of the lower school (junior high grades) who are unhappy about their lack of influence in the school clubs, which are dominated by the senior girls. Gipsy organizes the Lower School’s official protest, and the younger girls vote to separate and start their own clubs. Gipsy’s initiative and daring make her the popular “Leader of the Lower School.”

This position is put in jeopardy, however, by an assumed lack of communication from her father and consequent nonpayment of school fees. In reality, a letter sent by Mr. Latimer is inadvertently intercepted by Daisy Scatcherd and is mislaid for months, which causes Gipsy to be plagued with anxiety about her father. Some jealous girls take advantage of the situation and attempt to replace Gipsy as “leader” with the spoiled and selfish Leonora Parker. By the beginning of the spring term, Gipsy’s position in school is perilous: Still without word from her father, Gipsy is forced to work in the girls’ dormitory and mend school uniforms. She submits uncomplainingly but is in deep despair.

Gipsy’s nadir occurs when Miss Poppleton falsely accuses her of truancy and locks her in a dressing room. She decides to run away from Briarcroft, sail to South Africa, and search for her father. That very evening, the letter is discovered, revealing that Mr. Latimer is incommunicado in the depths of the jungle, and all business arrangements have been left in the hands of his London banker. Though her official position with the school is restored, meanwhile Gipsy has been wandering penniless through the streets of Liverpool, from where she had planned to embark for Africa. The impracticality of her scheme has become apparent to her, and, located by Meg’s father, she is brought back to Briarcroft, where the “prodigal” is welcomed with opened arms. At a spring pageant, held to celebrate the school and the country, she has a surprise reunion with her father, who has successfully begun a new mining enterprise. The novel triumphantly affirms the heroine’s reinstatement into both her “school family” and her real family.

Context

Angela Brazil was the author of more than fifty popular schoolgirl fictions written between 1906 and her death in 1947. She was the foremost female equivalent of two equally influential male writers of British boys’ school life of the previous century: Thomas Hughes and Talbot Baines Reed. The first noteworthy author of morally instructive school novels was L. T. Meade, whose A World of Girls (1886) attempted to transpose the formulas of Hughes’s and Reed’s work; Brazil, however, went beyond Meade in making her protagonists as unsentimentally direct and modern as possible for a twentieth century readership. Brazil’s books have fallen out of popular favor since the 1950’s, a reflection of changes occurring in British education which have aimed at reforming schools away from the traditional elitist model. Yet, during the first half of the twentieth century, Brazil’s novels were devoured by countless middle-class girls, who copied the slang and styles of her heroines.

The Leader of the Lower School is a typical example of Brazil’s work in that its overtly didactic purpose of instilling desired codes of behavior in the British schoolgirl is lightened considerably by the breezy and lively tone in which the instructive content is delivered. An ideal Brazil heroine is happy-go-lucky, stoic, generous with her time and material resources, and, above all, loyal to the school and its traditions. The girl whose initiative, organizational ability, institutional loyalty, and respect for the best traditions are developed and tested on the hockey fields and in the school clubs is the girl who will become a useful member of society. The Leader of the Lower School provides an intriguing glimpse into the social class which conceived of itself as the moral and economic backbone of the world’s leading power of the early twentieth century.