A Terrible Tomboy

A Terrible Tomboy is an early novel for girls by Angela Brazil, first published in 1904. It is one of Brazil’s earliest published works and predates the long series of boarding school novels that would establish her reputation as the leading English writer of girls’ school stories. The book reflects her own childhood memories and is partly autobiographical in character.

The central character is Peggy, a young girl growing up in late Victorian rural England with her family. She is the terrible tomboy of the title, a spirited and adventurous child whose disregard for the conventional restrictions placed on girls of her social class produces both comic complications and various moral lessons that the novel works through across its episodic narrative. Peggy’s friendship with Lilian Langdale forms the central relationship of the book, with the two girls sharing adventures and mishaps across a rural English childhood that Brazil clearly drew from her own experience.

The novel belongs to the substantial late Victorian and Edwardian literature for girls that was attempting to expand the conventional definitions of acceptable female behavior and to celebrate the energy, courage, and physical activity that earlier conventions had largely tried to suppress in young female readers. Brazil was sympathetic to this broader cultural movement and her tomboy heroine fits into the wider pattern of late Victorian female characters whose unconventionality is presented as essentially admirable rather than as a problem to be corrected.

The writing is in the warm clear style that Brazil had already developed in her early work. The rural English setting is observed with the kind of affectionate detail that someone who had grown up in such surroundings would naturally bring to the description. The various adventures and mishaps that fill the episodic plot are handled with the right combination of dramatic interest and underlying moral framework that the genre required.

The novel runs about two hundred pages and is best read straight through. For readers interested in early twentieth century English girls’ fiction, A Terrible Tomboy is a useful early example of Brazil’s work before she found the boarding school setting that would dominate her subsequent career. It pairs naturally with her later school novels and with the broader Edwardian girls’ fiction tradition.