you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

At a library book sale, I came across Sarah Emily Holt's Lady Sybil's Choice, and the frontispiece plus first paragraph caught my attention:

Alix says I am a simpleton. I don't think it is very pleasant. Sometimes she says I am a perfect simpleton: and I cannot say that I like that any better. Nor do I think that it is very civil in one's sister to put her opinion on record in this certainly perspicuous, but not at all complimentary manner.

Excellent! I thought. It sounds like a 19th century version of Catherine Called Birdy! The narrator, Elaine, is the youngest daughter (age 14 at the beginning) of the Count of Poitou during the Second Crusade; the novel takes her from her home in France to the Holy Land as she goes to accompany her elder brother, the knight Guy, to the court of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
( Here There Be Lots and Lots of Christianity, but also some other interesting things )