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

[CreativeGreen]

Apologies if the quotation isn't quite right there: no Forests to hand.

Inspired by a post on another thread, I need to talk about the Marlows. Is Rowan spectacularly awful, and Lois an Unsangered heroine? Is Giles ghastly? (I think yes). What's your Marlow Family Liking List?

(I will be posting and running for now but I have many thoughts and wanted to start the thread while I remembered to)

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.

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…

In that line-up, Pam doesn't seem quite so bad

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!

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!

Prison! She includes that too.

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.

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'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.

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?

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.'

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?!

They're fourteen and a half in RAH, aren't they? Doesn't Nicola say so to Giles?

I don't know if AF intended that the twins were premature, but I've always thought they must have been. It would account for their early delicacy, and also allow for Peter coming between Ginty and the twins. It only works if you assume Mrs M fell pregnant very quickly after the births of Ginty and Peter, and the twins came very early.

It is, and the film certainly supports AF's theme that too much Gondalling can become dangerous.

It's high enough that she's calculating her 4' plus her arms, but it definitely references her being 4'. Which even allowing for post war nutrition is decidedly unlikely - I think the twins would have been 12ish by TM&TT. The illustrations in my edition do show all 4 Marlows as looking much younger than expected, & oddly elvish; Ginty in particular is all eyes & pointy ears.

I'm not sure AF had that much familiarity with actual teenagers. They all seem to be physically tiny whilst mentally operating as Eng Lit undergrads. I mean, it would be lovely in some respects if that were a realistic vision - English teacher here - but...

I love her descriptions of The Staff

Miss Latimer - like a gorgeous jersey cow. And Miss Cromwell with her acid tongue and low tolerance for fools.

There was a very short fanfic on I think Trennels (could be AO3 though) in which it was revealed that Miss Cromwell had worked at Bletchley Park. Apart from the stretchy timeline, it was entirely credible.

Lucky Bletchley. I longed for my teachers to be like Crommie!

Absolutely wonderful books. I keep trying to get people to read them (no, they aren’t like Malory Towers and the other school stories) as they are so special. Love the characterisation and love Forest’s use of language. Poor Rowan (who I would fear in real life) taking on Trennels and the adults letting her do so, I always felt for Nicola when she got The Letter from her mother too. I have to say that I really enjoyed the ‘follow on’ book published by GGB a few years ago as I wanted to know what happened to the characters.

girls gone by own the publishing rights so you can get from there or Amazon.

they also published summer term -the term after run away home by sally someone, it’s very close to af.

You can’t, alas.

Yes, GGB has reprinted all the Marlow books at some point, but only one is currently in print, The Player’s Boy. I get that they’re a tiny, old-school operation, and that it’s all very much a labour of love (you can pay by cheque!), but the AF books are seldom in print, print runs are small, and they refuse to produce e-books because they aren’t set up for it.

Ultimately I’d like the books to be more easily available from a bigger publisher, and to have Kindle editions.

If you look on Amazon, other than the GGB The Player’s Boy, all the listed options are secondhand, and often extremely expensive. There’s a copy of Run Away Home for €301!

I really appreciate all that GGB do - republishing old titles and commissioning fill ins - but I wish they would bite the ebook bullet. I prefer real books but Kindle keeps costs down and is good for those of us with less space for all the books we want to read.

i have woken up thinking about why I like Antonia Forest so much and it is because her characters, whilst far grander than anyone I’d met growing up, were real in how they behaved. There was a chapter (when Nicola gets the letter from her mother) when the rest of the form were playing up the student teacher. It was school as I knew it. It is a shame she didn’t write more.

@WryNecked I bought two copies of Run Away Home from a library book sale for 10p each. They had about ten of them in a pile (this was back in the early 90s). I wish I’d got them all. I could have made a nice amount and bought a pony or a cream dress.

The sequel published by GGB is Spring Term ( not Summer Term) by Sally Hayward. She does a pretty good job but it doesn’t quite work for me because she turns Ginty into a much more stereotypical schoolgirl villain whereas AF’s portrayal is characteristically nuanced. It’s worth a read if you can get hold of it but it’s not AF.

I’ve never read it, because it just seems like a crazed endeavour — AF was a genius, and honestly, it seems arrogant to think ‘I know! People want to know if Esther and Nick made up, whether Ann forgave the others for lying about the Edward Oeschli situation, whether the Karen, Edmund and the children situation improved etc, so I’ll just write it up!’

"Well, but I mean, in other forms, we do elect...."
"Precisely. And in mine, I appoint. I congratulate you on taking the point so quickly."