I don’t remember how old I was (eight or nine, judging from memories of where I read it) when I first found a copy of Antonia Forest’s End of Term. It was secondhand, and the last few pages were missing but it was one of those big childhood literary milestones. Because with Forest I was exposed to a sort of interiority of thought that I’d never seen before – it was a sudden understanding (obviously one already knew this on an intellectual level) of the realness of the insides of other people’s heads. And there were a couple of scenes that I remembered long afterward, when I’d forgotten the title and the author. My copy of the book disappeared when we moved to India and I would not read it again for many years.
I’d read quite a few of Forest’s books out of libraries but the next time I owned one was in 2009 and it was End of Term again. A friend in Dublin discovered it in a pile of free books. I had to give up a lovely old copy of The Big Sleep in exchange, but it was worth it. A few months afterwards I used my M.Phil as an excuse to buy Autumn Term. Last year my then boyfriend decided to hunt down the books I did not have for my birthday – quite possibly the best present I will ever receive. I now own all of her books except the historicals:
(A very fuzzy picture of my Forest books)
Most of Forest’s books (all of those pictured above except for The Thursday Kidnapping) are about the Marlows, a large family composed of mostly girls. The most well-known of these are the four school stories, set at the girls’ school Kingscote. But ten Marlow books has never felt like enough, and while fanfiction has provided some excellent additions to the story, Forest isn’t that widely known an author. So I am both nervous and excited by the publication (by Girls Gone By press, without whom I would never have found affordable copies of some of these books) of Antonia Forest’s Kingscote: Spring Term by Sally Hayward. My copy has just shipped, and I’m taking this opportunity to do something I’ve never done before: in the coming weeks I’ll be reading and writing about all of the Marlow books in order. I hope this will be fun even for those of you who have never read Forest’s work.
I’ll also be linking to the posts here as they are written:
Autumn Term The Marlows and the Traitor Falconer’s Lure End of Term Peter’s Room The Thuggery Affair
