The Princess of the School

Angela Brazil built her career on the girls’ boarding-school story, and this 1920 novel shows the formula working at full stretch. Sisters Lilias and Dulcie Ingleton board at Chilcombe Hall, a small school of twenty pupils run on determinedly artistic lines, but the important business happens at home. Their parents went down with the Titanic, and they live at Cheverley Chase with their grandfather and their brother Everard, who assumes the estate will one day be his. The grandfather’s death proves otherwise. His will hands Cheverley Chase to Leslie, the child of his elder son Tristram, and the family’s assumption that Leslie must be a boy collapses when a cousin raised in Sicily arrives. Brazil is less interested in the legal puzzle than in how the girls absorb the newcomer.