I have just blued £30 on Nicola bloody Marlow

Oh my goodness, I'd forgotten all about these books, I used to love them. If it wasn't so hot I'd go round to my parents and get up into the loft to see if I still have them.

Who is Karen's role model? - surely her mother? Who must have married and had children really young. Then perhaps it wasn't the studies at Oxford but the academics - meeting women still more likely to be unmarried and totally dedicated to the scholarly life - she wouldn't be the only woman to think 'that's not what I want and is that what I've let myself in for?

She's had numerous teacher role models at school, though -- Latimer and Miss Cromwell, not to mention Miss Keith, are all, one imagines, graduates, quite possibly Oxbridge, and are all presented as donnish. It's at least as easy to see them as Karen's role models as the rather cipher-ish mother she sees only in the vacations, and only seems to emerge as a personality when she blows the proceeds of a family tiara on buying Ginty Catkin and herself Chocbar, and appearing at the hunt sidesaddle in a riding habit.

And while 1967 was still five years or so away from Brasenose, Jesus, Wadham and whichever other ones it was starting to admit women, women had been full members of the university since 1920, and the first women's colleges had existed since the late 19thc.

Absolutely it was still unusual, but 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. Or that even the most loved-up teenager could have thought that being a housewife and looking after three grief-stricken children you've never really met was that attractive a prospect?

Only, of course, she does, so we look around for reasons.

Perhaps Edwin was wondrous in the sack.

Maybe this is the chasm between women who actually went to university in the 60s, never mind the 80s or 90s, and AF. It's hard perhaps to look back and feel just how unusual it was to go to university then. Who is Karen's role model? - surely her mother? Who must have married and had children really young. Then perhaps it wasn't the studies at Oxford but the academics - meeting women still more likely to be unmarried and totally dedicated to the scholarly life - she wouldn't be the only woman to think 'that's not what I want and is that what I've let myself in for?'

I think Karen will go to the Open University in 15 years or so and will probably end up as quite a high up civil servant, much to her own surprise.

I mean, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the idea that she's got a bad case of the Oxford horrors and opted out, only saying there's no evidence for that, is there? It's only that readers are baffled and look around for what can possibly have caused her to marry Edwin!

I feel that Karen has fallen desperately in love with the first man she's met who is on her intellectual level. She's prepared to take the limited amount he has to offer as she knows that then she's got him for good. She's prob also met people who are brighter than her for the first time and has decided to throw in the towel.

I must admit that this is one of the rare moments in AF where I feel we only get her family's bafflement, and no real hint at Karen's motivation, especially her rush to get married ASAP, despite Edwin's ex-wife's recent death and the presence of three grieving young children. A lot of readers on Trennels and elsewhere go for the 'she's unnerved by how difficult her Oxford studies are, and is secretly relieved to find a reason to quit' explanation, but there isn't in fact anything in the text to support that, is there?

She's been an inept headgirl, but always been academically excellent, has the classic Marlow blonde and blue-eyed good looks, and no indications she's shy or insecure, or that Kingscote won't have prepared her well for Oxford...? Especially with her poor HG performance in the recent past and all that stuff about never seeing any particular reason why a bunch of misbehaving juniors should obey her can she really have decided that she's a natural stepmother of three in circumstances anyone would find challenging?

Karen (and I agree about her name) just seems to me to do something out of character out of the blue because AF wants her to!

With Trennels being entailed, didnt that mean they couldnt sell it anyway?

I remember the Guardian being more middle-of-the-road in the 80s, but still known as the Manchester Guardian and being less biased towards the SE than othet papers, which probably led to it being perceived as lefty during the Thatcher years.

Agree with you about Karen and Edwin. She does strike me as someone who might not cope well with brighter people all round her, what with academics having been her Thing.

Maybe Karen was a family name, possibly a Nordic or German ancestor in there or a historic variant of Katherine?

It's the old problem of being asset rich cash poor where the assets need upkeep to retain their value and have a family meaning that means they are emotionally difficult to sell.

There was still a body of academics which read The Times in the 60s, Heads of House, the establishment figures, but Edwin hasn't got there and is far more likely to be a Guardian reader. And iirc it was a bit more middle of the road then: my parents regularly alternated it with The Times and The Telegraph. Still had a flavour of appealing to a wide northern readership across the classes and political range.

I feel that Karen has fallen desperately in love with the first man she's met who is on her intellectual level. She's prepared to take the limited amount he has to offer as she knows that then she's got him for good. She's prob also met people who are brighter than her for the first time and has decided to throw in the towel.

He's oveewhelmed with grief and guilt, maybe ASD, knows he shouldn't be taking advantage of her emotionally but it's a way out without giving in to his MIL and losing the children. I'm always surprised at the riding stock incident. The wimsey incident I really like, he def feels human. You can see what he would have been like to the impressionable Karen who has rarely had a father at home.

As an aside, I'm always perplexed by Karen's name. Yes the 60s but she would have been a 50s/late40s baby. Everyone else has UMC names. I would have expected her to be called Emma, SophIa ( not sopheea), Pamela, Victoria, Elizabeth, Margaret, Magdalen, Helen. Or an interesting family name like Laurie.

I would read Edwin as more middle-middle class as compared to the Marlows' upper-middle. A lot of the differences are down to the era - by the 60s when middle-class people gave up on being able to afford servants, the Marlows become an anomaly - it's most likely that Mrs Bertie and Doris come with Trennels-the-farm-business and that in Hampstead the Marlows would have only had maybe part time cleaner and gardender and someone to help with 'the rough', if that.

In Cricket Term, they are paying school fees for Nick and Lawrie, Ginty and Ann, with Rowan and Karen on scholarships, Peter free, Giles earning - I think? And school fees have become a problem, as well as sourcing new uniforms, and a new bicycle is a huge luxury (horses are a bit of a bizarre addition to this, but I suppose if you happen to own stables and fields already they wouldn't cost that much extra to look after). So financially, Edwin isn't so very different, and he's certainly very respectable (ending up with an undergrad notwithstanding - it was the 60s...)

I see the Marlows as sliding from UMC life to mid-middle professionals by the 80s, depending on how well Trennels can be made to run as a farm and whether they sell off the cottage and any other land, as opposed to becoming part of the UMC elite like David Cameron and the Chipping Norton set - but that would be perfectly plausible too.

What always strikes me about the Karen-Edwin-and-kids menage, is that it seems to be presented as an obvious social step down for a Marlow not just that the newlyweds live in the farm manager's house rather than Trennels itself, but they obviously don't have any Doris and Mrs Bertie around the house, the children go to state schools, not Kingscote or male equivalent, and they 'only' have Edwin's salary. Landed-gentry, former private school HG and scholarship-laden Oxford undergraduate Karen is depicted as a harassed housewife, cooking (not very successfully), noting missing food from the larder, and mending costumes we only ever seem to see her in the kitchen of her house. (When it seems about five seconds since she was cocooned in the Trennels library in Peter's Room, hard at work in her Christmas vac and doling out advice on the Brontes and fantasy games...)

I'm not from this country, so perhaps not entirely alive to all nuance, but I would have said Edwin codes as lower-middle-class...? Does being a Guardian reader correlate to thwacking annoying naval cadets across the face with a riding crop?

Yes, I agree Edwin is a man of his time, though even by 1950s standards I think he is an over- controlling father. It is interesting how by the end of RMF you begin to like him a bit more, as does Nicola. Still can't see him as a lefty, though.

I hope they do The Cricket Term soon - my copy is split along three-quarters of the length of the spine and I hardly dare open it now.

GGBP are re-publishing End of Term at the end of August, a bargain at £13.

Not your book but made Dh buy me ballet shoes recording on record (proper Moira reading and everything) thing is we don't have a record player. Or know anyone that does 🙄

I think he was just a man of his time, still grieving but completely unable to process it. And I think Karen knew exactly what she was doing.

But he's so authoritarian ! Also clearly believes that a woman's place is in the home. So annoying that Karen gave up her university place to take on his children full time.

Oh, I think the Guardian is another thing they don't like about him. He's a academic - so likely to be lefter than the anti intellectual Marlowes........

One thing that has always puzzled me is that AF identifies Edwin as a Guardian reader ( in Ready Made Family). I would have thought Telegraph, wouldn't you?

Surely Nicola ended up as the First Sea Lord?

Or took early retirement and skippered a Tall Ship?

I like to think that, after getting the navy out of her system, Nicola would have gone on to become something like a big wheel in Amnesty or a legal aid lawyer, and Ginty never speaks to her again.

I agree Olive.

There's requests for prompts for more Forest fic at the moment - archiveofourown.org/collections/antonia_forest_fanworks_2017/requests

Olive, spot on for both.

The bit where I like Mr Merrick is when he's having a post-hunting breakfast with Patrick, Ginty and Nick, and P and G are being snide about Nick's riding skills and she's still shaken from realising the other two are Gondaling on the hunt and almost jump on her, and Mr M's eyebrows 'comment unfavourably on this breach of hunting etiquette'

Also the bit where he compares Ginty, not very favourably, to the Lady of Shalott, and says, quietly devastatingly, that it's evens whether she goes to the good or the bad and he doubts it'll be any great shakes either way. Presumably this is less casual than it sounds, and in fact he's trying to stop Patrick tying himself up to the lightweight Helen of Troy next door in his teens?

It's Mr Merrick I love. Recusant family ( sooo romantic) , principled, obv good seat on a horse, well read and civilised, views Patrick's manners as important, sees straight through Ginty... Peter Wimsey without the irritating bits.

I love the letter that's sent expelling Patrick. I won't call it hypocritical because I think it's sincere but it's so Series 2 in Old Anglican Speak, deliciously awfully vomit- makingly yucky.

Giles, ah yes, Giles. I think you are supposed to find him attractive. I think the portrayal is good: he would have been furious to have to deal with a shame-making over-literal little sister. Like you, Bertrand, I used to have to see too many of that type. I think he is at least intelligent, whereas a lot of the people I used to have to dance with were less intelligent than their livestock. He is obviously going to grow into his father when he has learned a bit more about management.

It's not so much the Marlows being right-wing as the fact that class structures haven't really changed that much between The Player's Boy and say Cricket Term - and then Attic Term bumps into the 70s rather violently.

Naomi-as-plot is in Trials for the Chalet School, but almost any of the post-war titles could be used. I recall the first book with Mary-Lou and she meets the eight-year-old triplets who tell her she must be going to their aunt's school. ML says she doesn't know where she's going and they explain that it's the only school around "except for the village school, and you won't go there"!

Blyton did try to make clear that being poor or nouveau wasn't bad in itself; it was pretending not to be that was the grievous sin. Snobby Angela who didn't want to be friends with skint Eileen was criticised as much as Pauline or Eileen who pretended to be better-off than they were. Though still plenty of prejudice left - The Six Bad Boys always gets me as it's really well-researched and based on true news reports - so at the end the nice middle-class protagonist who fell in with a bad lot is let off by the juvenile court and his widowed mother rehoused on a nice new estate. The working-class kids get probation, one goes to foster care, but one lad, living with a violent grandfather, is sent to Borstal - because he was Irish so what do you expect?!!

As long as you are half exotic/foreign you are allowed eccentricity. But only the very old wealthy British characters are allowed even a smidgen of real individualism