A Harum-scarum Schoolgirl

Diana Hewlitt is fourteen, American, and short on self-restraint. Her father’s work calls him to Paris in the last year of the war and her mother goes with him, but Diana cannot get a passport, so she is parked at Pendlemere Abbey, a small school in a converted medieval abbey beside a lake in the north of England. She arrives during an upheaval of its own: the principal, Mrs. Gifford, has left suddenly for Burma, and the second mistress, Miss Todd, is now in charge and keen to try the ideas her predecessor blocked. The book runs in episodes rather than one arc, taking in Armistice Day, an English Christmas, a supposed haunting, and Loveday Seton, a senior girl whose grandfather gambled away the Abbey estate. Brazil wrote to entertain her readers, not to improve them.