Angela Brazil (rhymes with Dazzle) was born in 1868 in Lancashire, England. She had two older brothers and an older sister. Unlike many girls at the time, Angela was enrolled in school from the age of four, and went on to attend an exclusive secondary boarding school for girls, and followed that with a qualification at Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. Angela was a keen writer from an early age, producing a magazine with a friend at age ten, and ultimately publishing more than 60 books between 1900 and 1946. Although Angela Brazil wasn’t the first author of “school stories”, her focus on writing to entertain rather than instruct transformed the genre and paved the way for others like Enid Blyton, Jill Murphy, and JK Rowling to follow in her footsteps (the first of Enid Blyton’s many series of boarding school stories, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, was published in 1940; Jill Murphy’s series The Worst Witch starting in 1974; and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series starting in 1997). Angela was very close to her mother, Angelica, and sister, Amy. She never married and had no children of her own, but she became popular and influential in a large circle of mostly-female friends in Coventry, where she settled in her forties. She was also an active philanthropist and conservationist. Angela Brazil died in 1947 at the age of 78.