Antonia Forest Fans ...

Me too, thanks!

I do! And I will!

Thank you 😀

Well if you want to get lost in a rabbit hole of all things Antonia Forest, have a look at the archived discussions, read throughs, fan fics, articles, and so on at

https://trennels.dreamwidth.org/

It will occupy you for months!

Just found this thread, how exciting! Not had time to read it all yet but will be back to do so.

I've loved these books since I first read Autumn Term when I was around the age of the twins at the time. (A long time ago.) I've read all the Marlow books at some time, but very long ago in some cases. Gradually re-gathering them, which is obviously hard without paying crazy prices.

Love the writing, the dialogue, characterisation and how complex, believable and relatable the characters are.

Wasn’t Kingscote loosely based on Sherborne Girls? It wouldn’t actually have been that big a pond though. In my women’s college there were 5 of us in the classics intake (early 70s); 2 from grammar schools, three from independent. The other women’s colleges would have been similar.

Ah, now that's an interesting point - was Kingscote a top school? Grandma Paris thought so.
I suppose it pushed the girls academically and in other ways, and whatever decade AF was writing in, they were expected to go to university and have proper careers rather than be good wives and mothers.
By contrast the Pamela character in Malory Towers has to become a deb, find a husband and run the family estate. Though is Rowan the equivalent of that, skipping the deb bit? Pamela acknowledged in the TV version that 'it's a way of life that's dying', but meanwhile she's stuck with it.
I'm inevitably reflecting my own state girls' school, similar in the ambition department, maybe similar sizewise - c600 girls, with a gaggle each year groomed for Oxbridge. So Karen would be one of those, from a small fish into a big pond..

Agreed, very well put again!

I'm not sure AF really thought about Karen all that much after the first book. She is described as 'not being able to abide the human young', but elsewhere, she and Ann are running children's games at a party or something because that's the sort of thing they naturally liked to do.

I get the feeling that she was kind of surplus to requirements after Autumn Term, and only comes in useful occasionally when needed - to make the plot of the Oxford/Rose book possible, etc. She never seems quite as fully developed as the other characters (though obviously head and shoulders above minor characters by other authors!).

@TarquinGyrfalcon I’m not sure that she would have been outclassed academically. I actually read Classics at Oxford, a bit later than Karen would have done, but still at a time when only five colleges were open to women. It was fairly difficult to get in and very
difficult to get a scholarship , even from a ( presumably) top school like Kingscote ( I didn’t get one). So I think she would have kept up ok. Maybe she struggled socially? She doesn’t seem to have had much of
a friendship group, unlike the other Marlows. Or many outside interests. Hence she related better to the older Edwin than to her contemporaries.

Yes, and it’s particularly odd when we’re told that she ‘ can’t abide the human young’ so why does she do it? After all , Edwin doesn’t seem that much of a catch. Though to be fair we only see him through Marlow eyes.

It’s true the reader ends up doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to try to equate clever, highly-academic Karen, who doesn’t really do anything with vim but read, and who appears to be a natural scholar, given to brief, illuminating lectures on Austen and the Brontes’ juvenilia, with the Karen who is so anxious to marry a middle-aged divorcé-turned-widower (with three young children! who never seems to be that nice to her!) that she ditches Oxford after a couple of terms.

Endless Forest fan speculation about whether she has the classic ‘big fish, small pond’ experience when she goes up, and discovers she’s not that clever by Oxford standards, so Edwin is an escape route etc etc. But AF never tells us, just makes it clear it’s Karen pushing to marry immediately, not Edwin. And those scenes of a clever 19/20 year old turned drudge making puddings for three bemused children who barely know who she is are so grim…

Actually I may be wrong about the riding. I think Rowan says somewhere that ‘ Kay rides quite decently’. But it doesn’t seem to be a thing she does.

We’re not told that she has. She seems to spend her life doing academic work until she (mistakenly imo) ditches Oxford and becomes a sahm. She’s a very bad driver, a poor head girl and doesn’t like riding. In fact she’s probably the least well realised of all of them. Though because it’s AF she still comes to life.

Yes, Patrick does get distracted by hawks etc
Does Karen have any hobbies,?

But Karen does very well academically, wins scholarships etc (at least until she ditches Oxford to become a Dodd), whereas Patrick, while clearly bright, and good at some subjects, isn’t in her league…

All very true, well said 👏

Aha, that would explain why Karen and Patrick are both swots😀

Clearly Mrs Marlow had a fling with Mr Merrick?

But it's not a token "fault" that AF's nice characters have. All the characters are complex, and have a mixture of good and bad, but also characteristics that can be good in some ways and bad in others.

Take Lawrie for example: she's self-centred and I'm never quite sure whether she's a "good" character or a "bad". You don't often in children's books get that confusion.
The same characteristics that can make a character good in one book, may make them bad in another.

Nicola, who is definitely meant to be good, can be quite nasty to someone she doesn't like, and doesn't always play by the "schoolgirls' honour", as Enid Blyton would say.

And in The Marlows and the Traitor the villain, Foley is in a lot of ways a more likable and charismatic character - Nicola clearly respects him even while not liking what he's doing, than the secret service man Anquetil. Anquetil also makes mistakes and we also see adults in authority being uncertain, and also annoyed by each other - again not a common thing in children's books.

And the internal dialogue you get from Nicola, feeling that their sentiments round Marie's death are hypocritical because they didn't like her, the shock when she realises Tim likes Lawrie more than her, her thoughts about Patrick and Ginty, and her realisation in The Ready Made Family the danger Rose was in, all are far beyond most books.
Plus the anti-Jewish undercurrent round Miranda still is in play today, and not just in schools. That was a brave thing to include.

I think a heroine/hero has to have 'a redeeming fault' to make them more appealing in a way a goodie goodie isn't. eg Darrell Rivers of Malory Towers loses her temper, tsk tsk!

Yes, in my book Karens all have dark hair. But it would have been strange to have only one brunette out of eight children..

I went to a concert of Christmas music last night where the choir sang an arrangement of Walter de la Mare's poem Before Dawn, which Miranda sets to the tune of Linden Lea in The Attic Term.

As you can see from my username, I am a big fan of these books. I love the way she uses the school story format to really go deeply into schoolgirl dynamics and friendships. Nicola's sudden realisation that Tim preferred Lawrie to her, the shift from really disliking Miranda to becoming her closest friend, the imbalance in the friendship between Nicola and Esther, and Ginny feeling a bit lost in her friendship group when Monica isn't around, all ring so true.

I also think most of us have known a Marie Dobson in our childhood and AF manages to give her a certain pathos, so that even though you understand why the girls don't like her, you also feel dreadfully sorry for Marie.

I agree that it is much easier to imagine these characters as grown ups than, for instance, Darrell or Sally from Malory Towers. They're complete people with distinct assets and flaws and very individual personalities. Likewise, the teachers are very real. They're not the perfect paragons or nasty pieces of work of so many school stories. They're just ordinary people with ordinary failings. Miss Cromwell, in particular, is a brilliant creation.