Antonia Forest facts for kids

Antonia Forest (26 May 1915 – 28 November 2003) was the pseudonym of Patricia Guilia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein, 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. 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.

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. She never married, and for many years supported herself by renting out part of her house in Bournemouth.

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.

‡ "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.

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.

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.

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.