"Delicately balanced on a razor edge of mutual toleration": Rowan Marlow, Saint or ?

There is a huge range of heights between 11 year olds and 13 year olds though, plenty of overlap. Perhaps it was a very high wall?!

In TM&TT Lawrie is described as about 4' tall - she's dropping herself off a wall by hanging by her hands. So yes, the twins were apparently absolutely tiny! I'm tall, so noticed & side eyed that bit particularly when reading it as a teenager - even my short friends were 5'.

I think Peter's Room is my favourite of the 'modern' ones. I suspect the director of the film Heavenly Creatures may have come across it - the girls' fantasy world is depicted in a very Gondally sort of way.'

Agreed on the illustrations, though, admittedly, I think her work is probably tough to illustrate. She’s intensely visual in some ways, but not at all in others.

I know that back when I was on the Trennels community on LJ, there were always lots of disagreements about what things looked like, like how atypically small and skinny must Nicola and Lawrie be as 13 year old girls for Lawrie to be able to fit into the monkey costume of an 11 year old boy, or what the various garments described were like — like the Disaster (pleats and a high yoke?), Nick and Laurie’s Christmas present party dresses or Miranda’s elegant green and black stripes, or whether the scarlet uniform can really have been fully scarlet?. Or what exactly Esther looked like, and why is Nick apparently the only one to register her beauty?

I'm so happy to find this thread, as another AF-lover <glances at collection on shelves>. They are extraordinarily intelligent and well-written children's books. There's a great section in Victor Watson's "Reading Series Fiction" about the Marlows - he compares AF to Jane Austen (IIRC the chapter is titled "Jane Austen Has Gone Missing".

I do think she must have been one of the worst-served of all 20th century authors by her jacket illustrations, except for the Margery Gill Puffin editions which are perfect. The first editions, as seen on the Girls Gone By covers, are pretty much universally hideous and give no clue to the riches inside.

I’m sure someone must have written fan fiction about Mrs Scott being unjustly accused of murder, or alternatively, being a crafty smuggling kingpin or embezzler or something. Or that Rowan cracks up, quits Trennels, and goes to work in the prison service, where she encounters a curiously familiar-looking, very beautiful inmate, with ‘glassy, cool, translucent’ good looks, and a ravishing, ash-blonde solicitor daughter who is trying to have her conviction quashed…

I'd already read Murder Must Advertise when Cricket Term came out, so I did get that reference. I read Hornblower not long ago because of Nicola - all the books are on FadedPage. I wasn't hooked, though. I didn't much like Hornblower himself.

Persuasion and Gaudy Night are two books that I can still find new things in, even though I first read both in my teens, many years ago.

Prison! She includes that too.

I laughed at your last point because I distinctly remember ordering Peter’s Room in the URR.😀

I’d love to see critical editions with all the literary and cultural references amplified in endnotes. I mean, now it’s less of an issue with the internet (I did, last time I read End of Term, google whether there was a specific historic background to Browning’s ‘How They Brought the Good News’ (no)), but ten year old me, long before the internet, had probably never heard of Browning, Peter Wimsey, or Edmund Campion, didn’t know the Lyke Wake Dirge, The Tempest, The Mask of Apollo etc — quite apart from not knowing what a livery stable was!

I loved all the inter textually in AF. The casual assumption that the reader would be well read enough to get the references, and the conversations that the characters had with each other about books that formed a common heritage. I was reading them in the early 90s, when television (Neighbours etc) was much more likely to be a cultural reference used in conversation that Austen or the Brontes, but I loved a world where I could get more out of it if I read more books.

I would love to have a family that would be able to intelligently discuss The Tempest if one of them got a role, without needing to re-read first. Sadly all my children are relatively resistant though I do my best!

I read DL Sayers long after I read the Cricket term, so for example the ‘Mr Tallboy’ reference was one I got much later.

The Chalet School was good for that too, although on a more superficial level. But they frequently were depicted reading books that actually existed, and it gently encouraged me to read those that had been referenced as well.

When I was at Oxford access to the Bodleian was like an Aladdin’s cave! I could order all the Brent-Dyers and Oxenhams I wanted - 6 at a time, delivered from the stacks to the library in a couple of days. Which meant that on reading ‘Gaudy Night’ I understood ‘sleeping in the arms of Duke Humphrey by day’ immediately!

And Jan Scott never mentions her mother, either, and there’s that conversation between Rowan and Nicola (I think? is it?) about how she might not just be dead, but mad or run away or something that shouldn’t be enquired about…

Well, I think that’s what fascinates me — would it have been another WH type of novel, Gondal to an extent rejigged for Yorkshire? Or might it have been something completely different? In my head, she decides to set it in Brussels, and it’s a very different take on the same fictional terrain that inspired Charlotte’s The Professor and Villette.

Yes, Mummy is a hard-ass and continually elsewhere, hard at work, never sounds all that keen on Miranda, liking her to be distracted with a million hobbies and commitments during school holidays, and apparently never comes to Kingscote while she and Nick are friends. Then again, AF does a bit of a line in self-involved/distracted, not obviously sympathetic mothers — Mrs Frewen, Mrs West, Mrs Merrick, Madame Orly, Pam Marlow, Karen as stepmother.

Ha I'd much rather read another Marlow novel than another Wuthering Heights!

Internet Archive works like an actual library, in that you ‘borrow’ a book and have exclusive access to that copy while you’re actively reading it (as shown by you tapping to turn over pages). However, if the current reader gets distracted or goes off to make dinner or answer the phone, their loan times out and you’ll be able to borrow.

As a writer I’m unreasonably pleased to see that earlier drafts (the cut scenes of RAH) are far less psychologically acute and beautifully written than the published text, so AF clearly worked hard and improved things draft by draft, rather than being one of those frightening writers whose first draft is acutely good and barely changes! I mean, I can see why she cut them.

Also, the lost MS of the Marlow novel after RAH plays on my imagination nearly as much as the (possible) lost MS of Emily Bronte’s second novel…

Ohh yes. There's a great fanfic of this with them buying antiques together at the Trennels closedown sale.

Miranda's parents not at all like that! Mummy is madly much a zionist and always busy with committees. Daddy is the only one who comes to concerts etc.

My mum was born in the early 1940s, she introduced me to a lot of girls' fiction from the 1940s/50s and earlier. She was a great fan of Elinor Brent-Dyer, not just the Chalet books but her other girls' fiction, also Noel Streatfeild and Angela Brazil. 'A point of connection' is a great way to put it, it's exactly that. My mum and I always had similar tastes in books and music, whereas my sister has very few overlaps with us for some reason - she mainly seems to read non-fiction and American fiction.

(Edited to remove the inevitable auto-correct of 'Streatfeild')