I have just blued £30 on Nicola bloody Marlow

Ah, when I looked online I only found the Quilter and Finzi settings. Yes agree generally AF not keen on anything modern!

But quite possibly Quilter. I was still being taught Quilter's settings in the 70s by people who seemed as old as the hills but would have been contemporaries.

Could be, but I'd have thought more likely Parry or Pierson? She's generally quite anti "modern" stuff.

Yes, I am. I've always wanted to produce that nativity play. And I'm interested in The Thuggery Affair music too. Amused myself by thinking about what they would have played at the Christmas dance. And what Anne would have played.

In Falconer's Lure when Nicola sings Fear no more the heat o' the sun in the competition, do you think it's the Roger Quilter setting? They just had Gerald Finzi's song on R3 in a recital, and it was lovely, but that was written for baritone whereas I see there's a high voice score for Quilter, and several recordings on Youtube. Quilter's was composed in 1921, Finzi's by 1942. FL published in 1957. Is anyone else on here interested in the music stuff?

Ah, but Kingscote was there to Develop Character, not just academic stuff. Realistically the local grammar would have been pretty good. Whereas Ginty and Lawrie needed Morals and Responsibility drumming into them - though Kingscote doesn't seem to do a v good job ( cf Ginty running away after the exam debacle, Lawrie's superstitions).

AF talks a bit about Karen in the introduction to the Girls Gone By edition of TMATT. She says she was having a conversation with someone who asked what all the Marlows would do when they grew up. She was listing them all - Lawrie becomes an actor, Nicola a Wren, Ginty marries well ... And the someone jumps in with "And Karen marries an Oxford don!"
And that got AF thinking, well, what sort of don would he be? What if he was older? With children? And the story went from there.
I agree Karen's story feels unlikely. I imagined her always being cleverer and a bit impatient with everyone else around her - you don't get much of a sense of her having much of a community in the early books. And I could see how Edwin and his brood would feel like a frightfully grown up and important thing to do with your life, which up to that point seemed to be devoted to books and lessons.
I agree I can't quite imagine her sticking with it long term and being happy. I think she probably ends up teaching at the grammar school and being frightfully good at it.
I've never quite forgiven Nicola's mother for that letter she sends her in Attic Term (?) If any of that family deserved an education, Karen and Nicola did.

Always good to meet another DWJ fan, BroomstickOfLove!

Don't we see the Marlows starting to get invited to all the local parties after they've been at Trennels a year or two, though? Presumably some local landowning/farming scions other than Patrick? Who do we see Karen and Rowan dancing with at all the parties in Peter's Room, when Ann is rushing about helping with the children and Ginty is looking ravishing in Doris's creation and an artful mantilla?

Nice username, Polly. I was PollyWhittacker on here a few years ago.

Polly, I see them running separate lives sooner or later. Neither is into the Oxford dinner party round.

Don't you think, though, that until Karen went to Oxford her main experience of life and men ( apart from brothers) was through the medium of books, especially the Brontes and Austen? Maybe she saw Edwin initially as a steady Capt Wentworth/ Mr Knightley type, as opposed to the Wickham-ish boys who surrounded her in 60s Oxford? I'm not sure the marriage would have lasted. I kind of hope she found radical feminism and left Edwin to get on with it.

My fave Karen bit too. As an aside I always wish EB's biographers would pick up the point.

I mean, she goes off to Oxford in the October and then turns up at Trennells in March announcing that she's going to be married.

And during the intervening Christmas between her first Michaelmas and Hilary terms, in Peter's Room, she's very much the same scholarly, detached but helpful Karen she was in the Kingscote library back when Tim is trying to locate The Prince and the Pauper and Karen immediately guesses what she wants and tells her where to find it. In Peter's Room, while the younger ones are all Gondalling in the Shippen, she's chin-deep in Thucydides in the Trennels library, but also tranquilly offering intelligent reflections on the Brontes and their fantasy games and correcting Ginty's romanticism about Emily Bronte with an a certain amount of tough-mindedness.

That's actually my favourite Karen moment in the entire series. She's clearly busy with Oxford vac work (would she have had collections at the start of Hilary?) and hiding from her grandmother, but shows no sign of being overwhelmed by it, is generous enough to take Nick and Ginty's Bronte questions seriously, and gets them doing close readings of an EB poem. It's practically a tutorial.

And she's absolutely right, of course, about Emily (or Charlotte for that matter) not 'pining for the moors' when she was away from Haworth, but for the freedom to arrange her own time so as to allow maximum Gondalling.

She'd have been a brilliant don. Sigh.

I love these books. I have the complete set apart from the historic ones.

I agree that Karen marrying Edwin seems improbable. Especially as it is all so quick. I mean, she goes off to Oxford in the October and then turns up at Trennells in March announcing that she's going to be married. And then immediately is. Dh and I were engaged within 6 months of meeting bit he didn't come with 3 small children and a recently deceased wife.

As a child I identified with Lawrie and thought she was very hard done by. I still have a soft spot for her. I used to imagine that she grew up into a brilliant actress and played Amy March in a West End production of Little Women. . Patrick cones to see her in it and realised he loves her not Ginty. With the benefit of adult hindsight I realise this is totally implausible.

I once read a fanfic story which had Peter and Patrick ending up together which I thought was good.

Olive, you're right. Gosh how embarrassing.

I agree it was probably bolted on. But authorial intention to write a story about a something relevant to the day and age can still be dealt with in a way that is fictionally true. Although it doesn't fit easily, nor IME does real life fit easily and I think she does it well. The apparent incongruity of the story and the characters are imv true to life,

I see him as on the AS spectrum. All of the attributes -sudden flash of temper included- fit with my experience of the intellectual slightly manque ASD man. And I still think it more than possible that Karen, quite possibly herself ASD but masking it better, would have fallen for him.

Just saying.

Yes, Karen's marriage seems joyless.
Her fiancé is relatively old, short, bad tempered, arrogant, even violent. I've never understood it. If he was depicted as arrogant but handsome....but no. Not even wealthy.

My Cricket Term is in almost separate pages :(

Edwin isn't even Karen's tutor, is he? She meets him at a party, or something, from what I recall? Of course, he couldn't have been her tutor, or they'd be no reason for the Dodds to relocate to Trennels because of Edwin's archive job -- they'd just have all stayed in Oxford, even if Karen dropped out, and there'd be no story. I think bookworm is right, and AF just wanted to write about a step family, and thus introduced one into the Marlow world. Like she wanted to write a Shakespeare novel, and also put that into the ancestral Marlow world.,

Maybe it helps us to understand why the Dodd storyline feels slightly bolted on to the Marlow world via Karen's slightly unconvincing love affair -- that it's an 'issue novel' featuring the same characters we know from school stories/holiday 'adventure' novels? We don't generally notice because AF is such a good writer, but you could say the same for The Thuggery Affair, and Run Away Home.

I think it just bothers me that clever, ambitious Karen's post-marriage life just seems so joyless. Not only does she is she a housewife with an at best tentative relationship with her stepchildren, her marriage doesn't seem wildly happy, but her relationship with Rowan, the only sibling who is nearby, is distant, and even Giles, unexpectedly home for Christmas, only pays a duty call to check out the new BIL.

• Ginny? Ginty.

I'm still convinced that after an unsatisfying period in the Wrens where she was going to get an ultra important promotion but is still sickened that she can't go to sea, Nicola marries Patrick, having converted ( cf the ref to her in the chapel) and not only ends up as a JP but prob instrumental in turning future members of the Thuggery around. That becomes her main outside occupation. She sends them on tall ships to turn them round.

I have a sort of feeling that she ends up running the joint estates until Geoff and then Giles retires to release Rowan to do whatever it is that Rowan wants to do. I'm never quite sure what that is. I think it might be international show jumping, where her female partner is an expert in dressage.

Ann doesn't make it as a nun or a nurse. She has a breakdown instead. But then she marries a delightful older stockbroker and has six children as she doesn't believe in contraception.

Ginny has failed marriage after failed marriage and her only reliable partner is gin. She ends up boring and raddled.

Laurie goes to Hollywood and we never hear of her again.

Peter becomes a naval lawyer.

Yes- when it comes down to it, Attic Term is just In the Fifth at Malory Towers or Mary-Lou at The Chalet School but by someone with a talent for writing, an imagination and a gift for characterization.

This is true. I have often wondered what she would have made of a different subject matter.

It is puzzling about Karen. Nicola or the rest of the family cannot fathom it either. Doesn't Nicola ponder her similarity to Lawrie at one point, in that they always end up getting what they want in a ruthless fashion and never mind the rest of them? Not sure about that as I don't own a copy of that one.

I think the answer is probably 'because she wanted to write a story about step-families and thought she might as well make it a Marlow story'. The Karen-Edwin relationship doesn't quite ring true, I agree. Mind you, even when Forest makes a mis-step she's still streets ahead of most writers!

I can't see Nicola as a lawyer or human rights activist. Perhaps she ends up helping Rowan run the farm.

'I think it would be anachronistic to necessarily imagine Karen was having the same kind of thoughts about the 'unnaturalness' of a college of unmarried women as Dorothy L Sayers gives her characters at Shrewsbury in the 1930s'

Yes, sorry my post was very muddled. I meant that when AF went to erm Oxford? in 1925, it was still REALLY unusual, and that was HER context for writing Karen.

But you're probably right, I'm reaching for some reason why AF marries Karen off to Edwin. Why??

And quite right about the entail, I'd forgotten.

Bikes like holidays are users up of cash and unnecessary. Horses are possibly resaleable until as old as Mr Buster and enhance your reputation.

I love the way she gets the names of the nags right. Catkin, Mr Buster and Chocbar, ( presumably by GoldenRod out of BlackMagic) just ring true.

Olive, no, no evidence at all for the Oxbridge horrors and less evidence than that for throwing it up " to do something worthwhile" in Ann style, not a person made for self sacrifice, as her disgraceful and unacceptable and un Marlowish code of conduct shows in her behaviour re the cottage. She's actually pretty like the vile Laurie there. I do think she knows Edwin doesn't love her; there's that heart breaking moment when Nick understands the meaning of lacrimae rerum on the train back.

I just feel, I suppose, that she falls in love with her tutor as so many do/did and this is a way to snaffle him and help him at the same time. And the alternative, an academic career, no longer feels so good.

perhaps Edwin was wondrous in the sack...well, maybe, but she wouldn't have had anything to compare him with, would she?