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Dame Flora Louise Shaw, Lady Lugard, DBE the daughter of an English father, Captain (later Major General) George Shaw and a French mother, Marie Desfontaines, was a British journalist and writer.
This is something that would be shelved alongside Frances Hodgson Burnett -- it's name-checked in Elizabeth Enright's The Four Story Mistake, and I don't know how I missed reading it then: 19th c. English girl sent home from India, to Ireland instead of Yorkshire; "civilizes" her tomboyish (and boyish) English cousins living on an Anglo-Irish estate, the oldest boy of whom is a Fenian sympathizer who yearns to assassinate the English estate manager. It's really a little torn about nationalist direct action versus Home Rule Reform (which didn't happen).
I hate grownups who don't take kids seriously. Honestly one of the things that still frustrates me like nothing else, even though I am now an adult and can see both perspectives, the inequality between kids and adults really gets me annoyed.
At first, I thought this was going to be a great, fun book. But then it sort of devolved into two major plot lines that were both drawn out and somewhat annoying – – the second one even more than the first. It definitely was the kind of book to teach children of a certain time about morals. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I found the adult characters to be quite remiss in their duties, especially the uncle! There was little character development (except for two major ones), and it was just very hard to believe that the children would’ve been left to run wild for seven years without much of any supervision or guidance.