Antonia Forest
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Antonia Forest (May 26 1915 - November 28 2003) was the pseudonym of a British children's author who was christened Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein (although her real name was never made public until after her death) and grew up in Hampstead, London. Born of part Russian-Jewish and Irish parents, she was educated at South Hampstead High School and University College, London.
It could be said that 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 from 1947 onwards she was a devout Catholic; she would eventually sum herself up as "middle-aged, narrow-minded, anti-progressive AND PROUD OF IT". Most of her books are concerned with the Marlow family, an ancient landed family whose patriarch is a Navy commander, and whose six daughters (out of eight children in all) all go to Kingscote School for Girls, a boarding school where all the Marlow books with "Term" in the title are set. The complete list of modern-day Marlow books is:
- Autumn Term (1948)
- The Marlows and the Traitor (1953)
- Falconer's Lure (1957)
- End of Term (1959)
- Peter's Room (1961)
- The Thuggery Affair (1965)
- The Ready-Made Family (1967)
- The Cricket Term (1974)
- The Attic Term (1976)
- Run Away Home (1982)
She also wrote "The Player's Boy" (1970) and "The Players and the Rebels" (1971), which concern themselves with the ancestors of the Marlows in Shakespeare's time, and an unrelated present-day (at the time) story, "The Thursday Kidnapping" (1963).
Antonia Forest's later books are notable for their use of a technique perhaps taken to its ultimate extreme by Richmal Crompton in her 1965 story "William and the Pop Singers"; namely the placing of characters who were created in an earlier age, and still seem essentially tied to that past time, in a very different world several decades later. So the same characters who initially recount their childhood experiences of the London Blitz eventually watch "Up Pompeii" and, later still, make themselves up as punks, when they are only a few years older. The 1976 book "The Attic Term" is notable for its use of the teenage character Patrick Merrick to express the writer's personal opposition to the liberalising doctrines introduced in the Catholic encyclical "Vatican II". In reality, had he been the same age he was when he first appeared in a Marlow story, Patrick Merrick would have been middle-aged by 1976, and, perhaps, more likely to oppose such ideas than a teenager would have been.
Antonia Forest never completed the successor to "Run Away Home" and it is believed that she destroyed the manuscript before her death. After many years out of print, her books have recently been returning to the public eye with a Faber reprint of "Autumn Term" in 2000 followed by Girls Gone By reprints of "Falconer's Lure", "Run Away Home" and "The Marlows and the Traitor" during 2003, and "The Ready-Made Family" in 2004, with more to follow.