I have just blued £30 on Nicola bloody Marlow

[Failedspinster]

Help me. I'm addicted. By hook or by crook I obtained two Antonia Forest paperbacks at low prices. It was not enough. Now I've just bought another for thirty sodding quid I can ill afford, comforting myself with the knowledge that I can always economise on clothes.

I know I am not alone. Please tell me your stories of absurd expenditure of money and effort to secure a favourite.

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.

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 :(

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

Always good to meet another DWJ fan, BroomstickOfLove!

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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

What was the concert in ? The Albert Hall, where Patrick cries ?

www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=14863

Here we go..

Nicola sings in a competition which is part of the local festival, when all Marlows except Giles, who is away, and Ginty, who is rebellious, win impressive numbers of events. The concert at RAH doesn't include vocal works, iirc.

Thanks for link to Parry/Pierson. I'd never heard of Pierson.

Yup, I remember the comp. no, I agree the Albert Hall doesn't. Was just trying to recall what they were playing.

No sweat.

Oh dear. We sang a gorgeous version of Fear No More the Heat O the Sun when I was at school - I loved it so much. I've had it in my head as the version Nick sang, but I've just YouTubed both the Quilter and the Finzi versions and it's neither of them. It's closer to the Finzi version, in 6/8 time, but unless I've misremembered badly, the tune is very different. I now want to hear it! Anyone got any ideas who might have written it, becuase YouTube's only giving me the Finzi and Quilter ones.

Could you try the Parsons code?

DD is tucked up in bed reading Autumn Term right now. I really want her to love it and am trying not to get my hopes up. She has finished a 2 month long binge read of everything I own by another favourite author.