There was a great silence in the school-room. A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, tall and strikingly handsome in figure, with abundant masses of raven-black hair, dark eyes under dark er eyelashes, and proud and well - cut lips, walked up to the school mistress's table. There was scarcely any thing of malice or miss chief visible in the bold carelessness of her face.
The school-mistress looked up from some accounts she had been studying.
William Black was a Scottish novelist. During his lifetime, Black's novels were immensely popular and compared favourably with those of Anthony Trollope. However, his fame and popularity did not survive long into the 20th century.
Source: Wikipedia
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.