It has been claimed that the appearance of girls' boarding school stories was a response to a parallel development of the equivalent for boys in the same period, and there are certainly elements of boys' stories, such as Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, and the Greyfriars tales by Frank Richards, appear to have been borrowed by writers of girls' stories, including Brazil. However, this may accord an undue influence to this literature, as there had been a gradual development from the 18th century toward fiction which was more specifically focused on gender, and many of the tropes in Brazil's books derive from the real-life schools attended by early 20th-century girls.