Antonia Forest

Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 – 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of Patricia Guilia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein,[1] an English writer of children's novels whose real name was not made public during her lifetime. She is best known for the Marlow series.

Life

Forest was born to part Russian-Jewish and Irish parents on 26 May 1915.[2] She grew up in Hampstead, London, and was educated at South Hampstead High School and University College, London, where she studied journalism. During the Second World War she worked at an Army Pay Office.[3]

She embraced the way of life of the upper middle classes of the English shires with the zeal of the convert. From 1938 until her death she lived in Bournemouth and Dorset. At the end of 1946, she was a Roman Catholic. Eventually, she called herself "middle-aged, narrow-minded, anti-progressive and proud of it".

Forest was a letter-writer, corresponding both with her readers and literary figures such as GB Stern.[4] She never married, and for many years supported herself by renting out part of her house in Bournemouth.[3]

Marlow series

Forest's most well known work is a series of novels featuring one contemporary generation of the Marlows, an ancient landed family whose patriarch is a Royal Navy commander (later captain). Among eight children, all six daughters go to Kingscote, a boarding school where the four books named after school "Terms" are set.

Marlow books featuring the modern family
TitleDate  SettingTwins' Form ‡ 
Autumn Term1948Autumn termThird Form
The Marlows and the Traitor 1953Easter holidaysThird Form
Falconer's Lure1957Summer holidaysThird Form
End of Term1959Autumn termLower Fourth
Peter's Room1961Christmas holidaysLower Fourth
The Thuggery Affair1965Spring half-termLower Fourth
The Ready-Made Family1967Easter holidaysLower Fourth
The Cricket Term1974Summer termLower Fourth
The Attic Term1976Autumn termUpper Fourth
Run Away Home1982Christmas holidays Upper Fourth 
‡ "Twins' Form" refers to the school stages of twins Nicola and Lawrie.

The world of the Marlows is unusually fully described. The school stories feature the wide-ranging interests of the talented protagonists and the strengths and weaknesses of members of the circle.[5]

Antonia Forest's books are later noted for their technique in Richmal Crompton's 1965 story William and the Pop Singers: placing of characters who were created in an earlier age, and still are essentially tied to that past time, in a different world several decades later. The same characters who initially recount their childhood experiences of the London Blitz watch Up Pompeii! and make themselves up as punks when they are a few years older. The 1976 book The Attic Term is notable for its use of the teenage character Patrick Merrick to express Forest's personal opposition to changes in Roman Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council.

Forest had indicated she was working on a successor to Run Away Home, but no manuscript was found among her papers after her death in 2003.[3]

Forest also wrote The Player's Boy (1970) and The Players and the Rebels (1971), which are about the ancestors of the Marlows in Shakespeare's time.

Reception

The Thursday Kidnapping (1963) was the only book by Antonia Forest not about the Marlows and the only one to be published in the U.S.[6] It was a commended runner-up for the Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book by a British subject. Two of the modern Marlows books were also commended runners-up, Falconer's Lure for 1957 and Peter's Room for 1961.[7][lower-alpha 1]

Forest's books have received critical praise from Victor Watson, who called her 'the Jane Austen' of children's literature [8] and Alison Shell, who has studied Forest's theme of recusant Catholicism.[9] They also featured in Lucy Mangan's 2012 memoir of favourite childhood reading[10].

Reissues

Years after her books went out of print, they gradually returned to the public eye with a Faber reprint of Autumn Term in 2000. It was followed by Girls Gone By Publishers reprints of Falconer's Lure, Run Away Home, The Marlows and the Traitor, The Ready-Made Family, Peter's Room, and The Thuggery Affair. The Player's Boy was reprinted by Girls Gone By Publishers in 2006, The Players and the Rebels in 2008, and The Thursday Kidnapping in 2009. Since re-acquiring the copyright of all Forest's books apart from Autumn Term, Girls Gone By Publishers also published new editions of End of Term (2017) and The Cricket Term (2020). They also reprinted The Marlows and the Traitor (2015), Falconer's Lure (2016), Peter's Room (2018) and The Thuggery Affair (2019).

In 2011, Girls Gone By published Spring Term, a continuation of the modern Marlow saga, written by Sally Hayward.[11]

See also

Notes
  1. Today there are usually eight books on the Carnegie shortlist. According to CCSU, there were about 160 commendations of two kinds in 49 years from 1954 to 2002, including six for 1957, four 1961, and five 1963.

References
  1. "Antonia Forest". The Independent. 8 October 2013. Retrieved 8 February 2021.
  2. Guardian, 9/12/2003
  3. Heazlewood, Anne, The Marlows and Their Maker, Girls Gone By Publishers, 2007. ISBN 978-1-904417-90-3
  4. Heazlewood, Anne The Marlows and Their Maker, Girls Gone By Publishers, 2007. ISBN 978-1-904417-90-3
  5. Nelson, Claudia in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, OUP, Oxford: 2006, ISBN 978-0195146561
  6. Forest, Antonia "The Thursday Kidnapping" New York: Coward-McCann, 1965
  7. "Carnegie Medal Award". 2007(?). Curriculum Lab. Elihu Burritt Library. Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). Retrieved 2012-08-24.
  8. Watson, Victor, Reading Series Fiction, Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0-415-22702-X
  9. Folly 42 (2004)
  10. Mangan, Lucy, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, 2012. ISBN 978-1784709228
  11. Hayward, Sally Spring Term Girls Gone By: 2011 ISBN 978-1847451163
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