The Nicest Girl in the School (Edited) (Paperback or Softback)

It's 1910, and thirteen-year-old Patty Hirst has just been offered the opportunity of a lifetime. Her wealthy uncle will pay for her to join her cousin Ruby at the exclusive Morton Priory College, if Patty will undertake to be a loyal companion to his daughter. Unfortunately, Ruby seems to loathe Patty and rebuffs her every attempt to fulfil her obligations. As Ruby treats her with increasing hostility, Patty is more determined than ever to keep her promise to her uncle, earning herself the reputation as the nicest girl in the school due to her patience and kindness towards someone so nasty.

Can Patty keep up the pretence? Or will she snap?

First written by Angela Brazil and published more than a hundred years ago, this edition has been revitalised for a new generation of young readers by editor Elle Carter Neal.

Angela Brazil was born in 1868 in Lancashire, England. Angela was a keen writer from an early age, producing a magazine at age ten, and ultimately publishing more than 60 books between 1900 and 1946. Angela never married and had no children of her own, but she became popular and influential 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.

Arthur A. Dixon was born in England in 1872. He attended an art school, and was just 25 when his first oil paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Society of British Artists. Around 1899 he began illustrating books for Ernest Nister, Raphael Tuck & Sons, Blackie & Son, the Oxford University Press, and Collins Verlag. Arthur Dixon died in 1959.

Elle Carter Neal has been an editor for over fifteen years and is the author of The Convoluted Key, I Own All the Blue, and Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin. She lives in Australia with her husband and two children, and a blue Burmese cat known as the Great Australian Bite.