A Patriotic Schoolgirl

An English schoolgirl of 1918 joins the war effort from her boarding school — knitting, food economy, a spy scare and a hospital — while the boys she knows are in France. Angela Brazil wrote fifty school stories and invented the genre's slang; this one is a document of what the home front asked of the young. The patriotism is unqualified, which is what makes it useful now. Fifty-seven paintings by artists including Marianne North and Mary Cassatt, from a Bornean crinum to a California waterfall, offer a wider world than the schoolgirls of Brackenfield could see.