Ok this is a weird one. I don’t remember what the book was about. I remember one line, and it’s been going through my head. A chapter opens with a woman entering a room, described thusly: “Her nose leading, like the beak of a large predatory fowl…”
The woman may have been a schoolmistress or a spinster aunt, an antagonist but not necessarily a villain. And I have a vague feeling there was also a male antagonist, maybe her brother, who was waiting in the room that she entered.
That’s it. I can’t imagine why I am suddenly remembering this one line but it is driving me crazy. Suggestion #1: the character described could be Irma Prunesquallor, sister of Dr Prunesquallor in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. Suggestion #2: one of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeve and Wooser stories, possibly in the collection “Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit”
Lost Classics of Teen Lit: Name That Book! 